§ 14. Genii.
The tale of deities is now almost told. There remain only a few miscellaneous beings, identical or, at the least, comparable with the creations of ancient superstition, who may be classed together under the name of στοιχει̯ά[662] (anciently στοιχεῖα) or, to adopt the exact Latin equivalent, genii.
The Greek word, which in classical times served as a fair equivalent for any sense of our word ‘elements,’ became from Plato’s time onward a technical term in physics for those first beginnings of the material world which Empedocles had previously called ῥιζώματα and other philosophers ἀρχαί. The physical elements however were commonly supposed to be haunted each by its own peculiar spirit, and hence among the later Platonists the term στοιχεῖα became a technicality of demonology rather than of natural science[663]. Every component part of the visible universe was credited with an invisible genius, a spirit whose being was in some way bound up with the existence of its abode; and the term στοιχεῖον was transferred from the material to the spiritual.
But though the Platonists invented and introduced this new sense of the word, its widespread acceptance was probably not their work, but a curious accident resulting from misinterpretation of early Christian writings. In St Paul’s Epistles[664] there occurs several times a phrase, τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ‘worldly principles,’ which was apparently a little too cultured for many of those who heard or read it. It conveyed to their minds probably no more than ‘being enslaved to weak and beggarly elements[665]’ conveys to the British peasant of to-day. What more natural then than that the commentator should accept the word in the sense given to it by the Platonists, and that the common-folk who heard his exposition should readily identify the στοιχεῖα whom they were bidden no longer to serve with the lesser deities and local genii to whose service they had long been bound—to whose service moreover in spite of the supposed injunction they have always continued faithful? The Church, they would have felt, acknowledged the existence of these beings; ecclesiastical authority endorsed ancestral tradition; and since such beings existed, it were folly to ignore them; nay, since the Church declared that they were powers of evil, it was but prudent to propitiate them, to appease their malevolence. Thus στοιχεῖα came to be reckoned by every right-minded peasant among his regular demoniacal entourage. And so they remain—some of them hostile to man, some benevolent, but all alike wild, uncontrollable spirits—so that St Paul’s phrase στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου even appears in one folk-song metaphorically as a description of wild and wilful young men[666].
Thus the very origin of the term rendered it comprehensive in meaning. Even the greater deities of ancient Greece were, in a sense, local—the occupants of prescribed domains; Poseidon might logically be called the genius of the sea, Demeter of the corn-land; while lesser deities were always associated with particular spots and often unknown elsewhere. But mediaeval usage of the word στοιχεῖον and of its derivatives tended to widen the meaning of the word yet more. A verb στοιχειοῦν[667] was formed which properly meant to settle a genius in a particular place—either a beneficent genius to act as tutelary deity, or an evil genius whose range of activity would thus be circumscribed within known and narrower limits; but it was used also in a larger sense to denote the exercise of any magical powers. A corresponding adjective στοιχειωματικός[668] was applied to anyone who had dealings with genii or familiar spirits, and more vaguely to wizards in general. Thus the famous magician Apollonius of Tyana is described as a ‘Pythagorean philosopher with power over genii’ (φιλόσοφος Πυθαγόρειος στοιχειωματικός)[669]; and two out of his many miracles may be taken as typical of his exercise of the power. Once, it is recorded, he was summoned to Byzantium by the inhabitants and there ‘he charmed (ἐστοιχείωσεν) snakes and scorpions not to strike, mosquitoes totally to disappear, horses to be quiet and not to be vicious either towards each other or towards man; the river Lycus also he charmed (ἐστοιχείωσεν) not to flood and do damage to Byzantium[670].’ In the first part of this passage the verb is undoubtedly used in a very lax sense, for snakes, scorpions, mosquitoes, and horses can hardly have been conceived to have their own several genii or guardian-spirits upon whom magic could be exercised; but the charming of the river Lycus certainly suggests the restraining of the στοιχεῖον or genius of the river within settled bounds. This stricter sense of the word however comes out more clearly in relation to good genii who were settled by magical charms in any given object or place. Hence even the word στοιχεῖον reverted to a material sense, and was sometimes employed to mean a ‘talisman[671]’—an object, that is, in which resided a genius capable of averting wars, pestilences, and suchlike. Genii of this kind, we are told, were settled by the same Apollonius in the statues throughout Constantinople[672], where the belief in their efficacy seems to have been generally accepted; for there was to be seen there a cross in the middle of which was ‘the fortune of the city, namely a small chain having its ends locked together and possessed of power to keep the city abounding in all manner of goods and to give her victory ever over the nations (or heathen), that they should have strength no more to approach and draw nigh thereto, but should hold further aloof from her and retreat as though they had been vanquished. And the key of the chain was buried in the foundations of the pillars[673]’ on which the cross rested. The locked chain was probably the magical means by which the tutelary genius of the city was kept at his post.
But these wide and vague usages of the word and its derivatives have now for the most part disappeared. Leo Allatius[674] still used στοιχειωματικός in the sense of ‘magician,’ but I have not found it in modern Greek. A remnant of the verb στοιχειοῦν[675] is seen in the past participle στοιχειωμένος, which at the present day is applied in its true sense to objects ‘haunted by genii.’ And the word στοιχειά, though locally extended in scope so as to become in effect synonymous with δαιμόνια or ἐξωτικά[676], comprising all non-Christian deities irrespectively of their close connexion with particular natural phenomena, still maintains in its more strict, and I think more frequent, usage the meaning of genii.
The term thus provided by the Platonists and popularised accidentally by the Church is a convenience in the classification of demons; for the ancient Greeks had no popular word which was exactly equivalent; they had to choose between the vague term δαιμόνιον which implied nothing of attachment to any place or object, and the special designation of the particular kind of genius. The Latin tongue was in this respect better supplied. It must not however be inferred that the introduction of the useful term στοιχεῖα into the demonological nomenclature of Greece marked any innovation in popular superstition. The Greeks no less than the Romans had from time immemorial believed in genii. That scene of the Aeneid[677], in which, while Aeneas is holding a memorial feast in honour of his father, a snake appears and tastes of the offerings and itself in turn is honoured with fresh sacrifice as being either the genius of the place or an attendant of the hero Anchises, is throughout Greek in tone; and the comment of Servius thereupon, ‘There is no place without a genius, which usually manifests itself in the form of a snake,’ revives a hundred memories of sacred snakes tended in the temples or depicted on the tombs of ancient Greece. Moreover several of the supernatural beings whom I have already described, and whose identity with the creatures of ancient superstition is established, are essentially genii. The Lamia is the genius of the darksome cave where she makes her lair; the Gorgon, of the straits where she waylays her prey; and, most clearly of all, the Dryads are the genii of the trees which they inhabit. For the life of each one of them is bound up with the life of the tree in which she dwells; and still as in old time, so surely as the tree decays away with age, her life too is done and ‘her soul leaves therewith the light of the sun[678].’ The woodman of to-day therefore speaks with the utmost fidelity to ancient tradition when he calls the trees where his Nereids dwell στοιχειωμένα δέντρα, ‘trees haunted by genii’; such innovation as there has been is in terminology only.
One word of caution only is required before we proceed to the consideration of various species of genii not yet described. It must not be assumed that all genii, on the analogy of the tree-nymphs, die along with the dissolution of their dwelling-places; the existence of the genius and that of the haunted object are indeed always closely and intimately united, but not necessarily in such a manner as to preclude the migration of the genius on the dissolution of its first abode into a second. The converse proposition however, that any object could enjoy prolonged existence after the departure from it of the indwelling power, may be considered improbable.
The genii with whom I now propose to deal fall into five main divisions according to their habitations. These are first buildings, secondly water, thirdly mountains, caves, and desert places, fourthly the air, fifthly human beings.
The genii of buildings are universally acknowledged in Greece. The forms in which they appear are various; this may partly be explained by the belief that they possess the power of assuming different shapes at will; but it is certain also that their normal shape is in some measure determined by the nature of the building—house, church, or bridge—of which each is the guardian.
The genius of a house appears almost always in the guise of a snake, or, according to Leo Allatius[679], of a lizard or other reptile. It is believed to have its permanent dwelling in the foundations, and not infrequently some hole or crevice in a rough cottage-floor is regarded as the entrance to its home. About such holes peasants have been known to sprinkle bread-crumbs[680]; and I have been informed, though I cannot vouch as an eye-witness for the statement, that on the festival of that saint whose name the master of a house bears, he will sometimes combine services to both his Christian and his pagan tutelary deities, substituting wine for the water on which the oil of the sacred lamp before the saint’s icon usually floats, and pouring a libation of milk—for the older deities disapprove of intoxicants—about the aperture which leads down to the subterranean home of the genius. If it so happen that there is a snake in the hole and the milky deluge compels it speedily to issue from its hiding-place, its appearance in the house is greeted with a silent delight or with a few words of welcome quietly spoken. For on no account must the ‘guardian of the house,’ νοικοκύρης[681] or τόπακας[682], as it is sometimes called, be frightened by any sound or sudden movement. Much less of course must any physical hurt or violence be done to it; the consequences of such action, even though it be due merely to inadvertence, are swift and terrible; the house itself falls, or the member of the family who was guilty of the outrage dies in the self-same way in which he slew the snake[683].
These beliefs and customs are probably all of ancient date. Theophrastus[684] notes how the superstitious man, if he sees a snake in the house, sets up a shrine for it on the spot. The observation also of such snakes was a recognised department of ‘domestic divination’ (οἰκοσκοπική) on which one Xenocrates—not the disciple of Plato—wrote a treatise[685]. They were probably known as οἰκουροί, ‘guardians of the house’ (a name which is identical in meaning with the modern νοικοκύρης), for it is thus at any rate that Hesychius[686] designates the great snake which Herodotus[687] tells us was ‘guardian (φύλακα) of the acropolis’ at Athens, and which, by leaving untouched the honey-cake with which it was fed every month, proved to the Athenians, when the second Persian invasion was threatening them, that their tutelary deity had departed from the acropolis, and decided them likewise to evacuate the city. Thus the few facts that are recorded about this belief in antiquity accord so exactly with modern observations, that from the minuter detail of the latter the outlines of the former may safely be filled in.
The genii of churches most commonly are seen or heard in the form of oxen—bulls for the most part[688], but also steers and heifers[689]. They appear, like all genii, most frequently at night, and, according to one authority, ‘are adorned with various precious stones which diffuse a brightness such as to light the whole church.’ ‘They are seldom harmful,’ continues the same writer[690]; ‘the few that are so—called simply κακά—do not dare to make their abode within the churches, but have their lairs close to them in order to do hurt to church-goers.... Near Calamáta, on a mountain-side, there is a chapel of ease dedicated to St George. The peasants narrate that at each annual festival held there on April 23rd a genius used to issue forth from a hole close by and to devour one of the festal gathering. After some years the good people, seeing that there was no remedy for this annual catastrophe, decided to give up the festival. But a week before the feast St George appeared to them all simultaneously in a dream, and assured them that they should suffer no hurt at the festival, because he had sealed up the monster. And in fact they went there and found the hole closed by a massive stone, on which was imprinted the mark of a horse’s hoof; for St George, willing that the hole should remain always closed, had made his horse strike the stone with his hoof. Thenceforth the saint has borne the surname Πεταλώτης (from πέταλον the ‘shoe’ or ‘hoof’ of a horse) and up to this day is shewn the hoof-mark upon a stone.’
Harmless genii however are more frequently assigned to churches, exercising a kind of wardenship over them and taking an interest in the parishioners. At Marousi, a village near Athens, there is a church which is still believed to have a genius, in the form of a bull, lurking in its foundations; and when any parishioner is about to die, the bull is heard to bellow three times at midnight. A church in Athens used to claim the same distinction, and the bellowing of the bull there is said to have been heard within living memory at the death of an old man named Lioules[691]. Other churches also in Athens, not to be outdone, pretended to the possession of genii in the shapes of a snake, a black cock, and a woman, who all followed the bull’s example and emitted their appropriate cries thrice at midnight as a presage of similar events[692].
Why the genii of churches in particular appear mostly as bulls, I cannot determine. When the genius of a river manifests itself in that form, the connexion with antiquity is obvious; for river-gods, who ex vi termini are the genii of the rivers whose name they share, were constantly pourtrayed of old in the form of bulls. All that can be said is that the type of genius is old, though its localisation is new and difficult to explain.
The genii of bridges cannot properly, I suppose, be distinguished from the genii of those rivers or ravines which the bridges span. They are usually depicted as dragons or other formidable monsters, and they are best known for the cruel toll which they exact when the bridge is a-building. The original conception is doubtless that of the river-god demanding a sacrifice, even of human life, in compensation for men’s encroachment upon his domain. The most famous of the folk-songs which celebrate such a theme is associated with ‘the Bridge of Arta,’ but many versions[693] of it have been published from different districts, and in some the names of other bridges are substituted; in Crete the story is attached to the ‘shaking bridge’ over a mountain torrent near Canea[694]; in the Peloponnese to ‘the Lady’s bridge’ over the river Ladon[695]; in the neighbourhood of Thermopylae to a bridge over the river Helláda[696]; in the island of Cos to the old bridge of Antimachia[697]. The song, in the version[698] which I select, runs thus:
‘Apprentices three-score there were, and craftsmen five and forty,
For three long years they laboured sore to build the bridge of Arta;
All the day long they builded it, each night it fell in ruin.
The craftsmen fall to loud lament, th’ apprentices to weeping:
“Alas, alas for all our toil, alack for all our labour,
That all day long we’re building it, at night it falls in ruin.”
Then from the rightmost arch thereof the demon gave them answer:
“An ye devote not human life, no wall hath sure foundation;
And now devote not orphan-child, nor wayfarer, nor stranger,
But give your master-craftsman’s wife, his wife so fair and gracious,
That cometh late toward eventide, that cometh late toward supper.”
The master-craftsman heard it well, and fell as one death-stricken;
A word anon he writes and bids the nightingale to carry:
“Tarry to don thy best array, tarry to come to supper,
Tarry to go upon thy way across the bridge of Arta.”
The nightingale heard not aright, and carried other message:
“Hurry to don thy best array, hurry to come to supper,
Hurry to go upon thy way across the bridge of Arta.”
Lo, there she came, now full in view, along the dust-white roadway;
The master-craftsman her espied, and all his heart was breaking;
E’en from afar she bids them hail, e’en from afar she greets them:
“Gladness and health, my masters all, apprentices and craftsmen!
What ails the master-craftsman then that he is so distressèd?”
“Nought ails save only that his ring by the first arch is fallen;
Who shall go in and out again his ring thence to recover?”
“Master, be not so bitter-grieved, I will go fetch it for thee;
Let me go in and out again thy ring thence to recover.”
Not yet had she made full descent, not halfway had descended;
“Draw up the rope, prithee goodman, draw up the cable quickly,
For all the world is upside down, and nought have I recovered.”
One plies the spade to cover her, another shovels mortar,
The master-craftsman lifts a stone, and hurls it down upon her.
“Alas, alas for this our doom, alack for our sad fortune!
Three sisters we, and for all three a cruel fate was written.
One went to building Doúnavi, the next to build Avlóna,
And I, the last of all the three, must build the bridge of Arta.
Even as trembles my poor heart, so may the bridge-way tremble,
Even as my fair tresses fall, so fall all they that cross it!”
“Nay, change, girl, prithee change thy speech, and utter other presage;
Thou hast one brother dear to thee, and haply he may pass it.”
Then changèd she her speech withal, and uttered other presage:
“As iron now is my poor heart, as iron stand the bridge-way,
As iron are my tresses fair, iron be they that cross it!
For I’ve a brother far away, and haply he may pass it.”’
But while the most famous examples of sacrifice to genii are connected with bridges, the custom in a less criminal form than that which the folk-songs celebrate is common throughout Greece to-day. In building a house or any other edifice, the question of propitiating the genius already in possession of the site and of inducing it to become the guardian of the building is duly considered. Sacrifice is done. The peace-offering, according to the importance of the building and the means of the future owner, may consist of an ox, a ram, a he-goat, or a cock (or, less commonly, of a hen with her brood[699]), preferably of black colour, as were in old time victims designed for gods beneath the earth. The selected animal is in Acarnania and Aetolia[700] taken to the site, and there its throat is cut so that the blood may fall on the foundation-stone, beneath which the body is then interred. In some other places[701] it suffices to mark a cross upon the stone with the victim’s blood. In the same district the practice of taking auspices from the victim—from the shoulder-blade in the case of a ram and from the breast-bone in the case of a cock—is occasionally combined with the sacrifice, but is not essential to the ceremony.
But animals, though they are the only victims actually slaughtered upon the spot, are not the only form of peace-offering. Even at the present day when, added to the power of the law, a sense of humanity, or a fear of being pronounced ‘uncivilised,’ tends to deter the peasantry even of the most outlying districts from actually satisfying the more savage instincts of hereditary superstition, there still exists a strong feeling that a human victim is preferable to an animal for ensuring the stability of a building. Fortunately therefore for the builder’s peace of mind, the principles of sympathetic magic offer a compromise between actual murder and total disregard of the traditional rite. It suffices to obtain from a man or woman—an enemy for choice but, failing that, ‘out of philanthropy’ as a Greek authority puts it, any aged person whose term of life is well-nigh done—some such object as a hair or the paring of a nail, or again a shred of his clothing or a cast-off shoe, or it may be a thread or stick[702] marked with the measure either of the footprint or of the full stature of the person, and to bury it beneath the foundation-stone of the new edifice. By this proceeding a human victim is devoted to the genius of the site, and will die within the year as surely as if an image of him were moulded in wax and a needle run through its heart. Another variation of the same rite consists in enticing some passer-by to the spot and laying the foundation-stone upon his shadow. In Santorini I myself was once saved from such a fate by the rough benevolence of a stranger who dragged me back from the place where I was standing and adjured me to watch the proceedings from the other side of the trench where my shadow could not fall across the foundations. Nor are the invited guests immune; unenviable therefore is the position of those persons who are officially required to assist at the laying of the foundation-stones of churches and other public buildings. The demarch (or mayor) of Agrinion informed me that, according to the belief of the common-folk in the neighbourhood, his four immediate predecessors in office had all fallen victims to this their public duty; and he described to me the concern and consternation of his own women-folk when he himself had recently braved the ordeal. He honestly allowed too that he had kept his shadow clear of the dangerous spot.
So much importance is attached to these foundation-ceremonies that the Church has provided a special office to be read alike for cathedral or for cottage; and the priest who attends for this purpose is sometimes induced to pronounce a blessing on the animal that is to be sacrificed. This however is the more expensive rite; the victim has to be bought, and the priest expects a fee for blessing it; whereas the immolation of a shadow-victim costs nothing, is more efficacious as being equivalent to a human sacrifice, and provides an excellent means for removing an enemy with impunity.
The sacrificial ceremony is also sometimes performed on other occasions than those of the laying of foundation-stones. In Athens a precept of popular wisdom enjoins the slaughtering of a black cock when a new quarry is opened[703]; and an interesting account is given by Bent[704] of a similar scene at the launching of a ship in Santorini. ‘When they have built a new vessel, they have a grand ceremony at the launching, or benediction, as they call it here, at which the priest officiates; and the crowd eagerly watch, as she glides into the water, the position she takes, for an omen is attached to this. It is customary to slaughter an ox, a lamb or a dove on these occasions, according to the wealth of the proprietor and the size of the ship, and with the blood to make a cross on the deck. After this the captain jumps off the bows into the sea with all his clothes on, and the ceremony is followed by a banquet and much rejoicing.’ Here it is reasonable to suppose that the captain by jumping into the sea goes through the form of offering himself as a sacrifice to the genius of the sea, and that the animal actually slaughtered is a surrogate victim in his stead.
The strength of these superstitions to-day, as gauged by the shifts and compromises to which the peasants resort in order to satisfy their scruples, goes far to guarantee the historical accuracy of such ballads as ‘the Bridge of Arta.’ Not of course that each of the numerous versions with all its local colouring is to be taken as evidence of human sacrifice in each place named; exactitude of detail cannot be claimed for them. But as a faithful picture of the beliefs and customs prevalent not more perhaps than two or three centuries ago they deserve full credence. Both the wide dispersion of the several versions, and also the skill with which in each of them the action of the master-builder evokes feelings not of aversion but rather of pity for a man of whom religious duty demanded the sacrifice of his own wife, furnish plain proof of the domination which the superstition in its most gruesome form once exercised; and the intentions of the modern peasants, if not their acts, testify to the same overwhelming dread of genii.
That the ceremonies which I have described are in general of the nature of sacrifices to genii is beyond question. In the version of ‘the Bridge of Arta’ which I have translated, both the genius and the victim whom he demands appear as dramatis personae. Again, in some districts the word ‘sacrifice’ (θυσιό[705] or θυσία[706]) is actually still applied to the rite. Finally, though the victims are of various kinds and the forms in which a genius may appear equally various, the distinction between the two is as a rule kept clear; cases of a single species of animal serving for both genius and victim—of the genius for example appearing as a cock or of the chosen victim being a snake—are extremely rare.
Confusion of the two nevertheless does occur; the original genius of the site is sometimes forgotten, and the victim is conceived to be slain and buried in order that from the under-world it may exercise a guardianship over the building which is its tomb. Thus in one version of ‘the Bridge of Arta,’ inferior in many respects to that which I have translated, the complaint of the master-craftsman’s wife contains the line
τρεῖς ἀδερφούλαις εἴμασταν, ταὶς τρεῖς στοιχειὰ μᾶς βάλαν[707],
‘Three sisters we, and all the three they took for guardian-demons.’
Probably the same confusion of thought was responsible for the representation of the genius of a church in Athens in the shape of a cock, which is the commonest kind of victim; and possibly too the bulls which are so frequently the guardians of churches were originally the victims considered most suitable for the foundation of such important edifices. This error of belief has undoubtedly been facilitated by the use of a word which in its mediaeval meanings has already been discussed—the verb στοιχειόνω. This, as I have pointed out, meant strictly ‘to provide (a place or object) with a genius.’ But in modern usage it can take an accusative of the victim devoted to a genius no less than of the place provided with a genius. In Zacynthos and Cephalonia, says Bernhard Schmidt[708], the phrase στοιχειόνω ἀρνί, for example, meaning ‘I devote a lamb’ to the genius, is in regular use; and so too in the above rendering of ‘the Bridge of Arta,’ the phrase which I have translated ‘an ye devote not human life’ is in the Greek ἂν δὲ στοιχειώσετ’ ἄνθρωπο. Now verbs of this form are in both ancient and modern Greek usually causative. The ancient δηλόω and modern δηλόνω mean ‘I make (an object) clear’ (δῆλος): the ancient χρυσόω and modern χρυσόνω mean ‘I make (an object) gold’ (χρυσός). Similarly στοιχειόνω is readily taken to mean ‘I make (an animal or person) the genius’ (στοιχεῖον) of a place. If therefore this word continued to be applied to the rite of slaughtering an animal at foundation-ceremonies in any place where the true purport of the custom, as often happens, had been forgotten, language itself would at once suggest that erroneous interpretation of the custom of which we have seen examples; the victim would be raised to the rank of genius.
This development of modern superstition supplies a clue for tracing the evolution of ancient Greek religion, which has hitherto been missed by those who have dealt with the subject[709]. They have generally compared with the modern Greek superstition similar beliefs and customs prevalent throughout the Balkans and even beyond them, and have thence inferred that the practice of sacrificing to the genii of sites selected for building was of Slavonic importation. The wide distribution of the superstition in the Balkans, especially among the Slavonic peoples, is a fact; but the inference goes too far. To Slavonic influence I impute the recrudescence of the superstition in its most barbarous form, involving human sacrifice, during the Middle Ages. Ancient history, even ancient mythology, contains no story so suggestive of barbarity as one brief statement made by Suidas: ‘At St Mamas there was a large bridge consisting of twelve arches (for there was much water coming down), and there a brazen dragon was set up, because it was thought that a dragon inhabited the place; and there many maidens were sacrificed[710].’ The date of the events to which the passage refers cannot be ascertained; but I certainly suspect it to be subsequent to the Slavonic invasion of Greece. Yet even so the Slavs did not initiate a new custom but merely stimulated the native belief that genii required sacrifice in compensation for the building of any edifice on their domains. This belief dated from the Homeric age—nay, was already old when the Achaeans built their great wall with lofty towers, a bulwark for them and their ships against the men of Ilium.
‘Thus,’ we read, ‘did they labour, even the long-haired Achaeans; but the gods sitting beside Zeus that wieldeth the lightning gazed in wonder on the mighty work of the bronze-clad Achaeans. And to them did Poseidon the earth-shaker open speech: “Father Zeus, is there now one mortal on the boundless earth, that will henceforth declare unto immortals his mind and purpose? Seest thou not that contrariwise the long-haired Achaeans have built a wall to guard their ships and driven a trench about it, and have not offered unto the gods fair sacrifice? Verily their wall shall be famed far as Dawn spreads her light; and that which I with Phoebus Apollo toiled to build for the hero Laomedon will men forget.” And unto him spake Zeus that gathereth the clouds, sore-vexed: “Fie on thee, thou earth-shaker whose sway is wide, for this thy word. Well might this device of men dismay some other god lesser than thou by far in work and will; but thou verily shalt be famed far as Dawn spreads her light. Go to; when the long-haired Achaeans be gone again with their ships unto their own native land, break thou down their wall and cast it all into the sea and cover again the vast shore with sand, that so the Achaeans’ great wall may be wiped out from thy sight[711].”’ And later in the Iliad we read of the fulfilment; how that the rivers of the Trojan land were marshalled and led by Poseidon, his trident in his hands, to the assault of the wall that ‘had been fashioned without the will of the gods and could no long time endure[712].’
The whole passage finds its best commentary in modern superstition. Poseidon, though a great god, is the local genius; to him belongs the shore where the Greek ships are assembled, to him too the land where he had built the town of Ilium; to him therefore were due sacrifices for the building of the wall. But the god whose fame is known far as Dawn spreads her light deserves the rebuke administered by Zeus for his pettiness of spirit. An ordinary local genius, ‘some god far lesser than he in work and will,’ might justly wax wrathful at the neglect of his more limited prerogatives. Yet even so the wall was doomed to endure no long time. Then as now the divine law ran, ‘An ye devote not hecatombs, no wall hath sure foundation.’
In this passage there is of course no suggestion of a local genius in animal shape; the anthropomorphic tendency of Homeric religion was too strong to admit of that. But since we know from Theophrastus’ sketch of the superstitious man and from other sources that in the classical age genii of houses and temples were believed to appear in the form of snakes, we may without hesitation assign the same belief to earlier ages. Such a superstition could not in the nature of things have sprung up after an anthropomorphic conception of the gods dominated all religion, but must necessarily have been a survival from pre-classical and pre-Homeric folklore.
But, though Homer speaks of the genius only as a ‘lesser god’ without further description, he implies clearly that the present custom of doing sacrifice to such a being for the foundation of any building was then in existence. Did the sacrifice ever involve human victims? A positive and certain answer cannot, I suppose, be made; but bearing in mind the many ancient traditions of human sacrifice in Greece and even the occasional continuance of the practice in the most civilised and enlightened age[713] I cannot doubt it. I suspect that, if we could obtain an earlier version of the story of Iphigenia than has come down to us, we should find that the wrath of Artemis had no part in it, but that human sacrifice was offered to the Winds or other genii of the air—that the ‘maiden’s blood’ was, in the words of Aeschylus, ‘a sacrifice to stay the winds[714],’ ‘a charm to lull the Thracian blasts[715],’ that and nothing more. But a story still more strongly evidential of the custom is told by Pausanias[716]. In the war between Messenia and Sparta, when the Messenians had been reduced to extremities, ‘they decided to evacuate all their many towns in the open country and to establish themselves on Mount Ithome. Now there was there a town of no great size, which Homer, they say, includes in the Catalogue—“Ithome steep as a ladder.” In this town they established themselves, extending its ancient circuit so as to provide a stronghold large enough for all. And apart even from the fortifications the place was strong; for Ithome is as high as any mountain in the Peloponnese and, where the town lay, was particularly inaccessible. They determined also to send an envoy to Delphi,’ who brought them back the following oracle:
A maiden pure unto the nether powers,
Chosen by lot, of lineage Aepytid,
Ye shall devote in sacrifice by night.
But if ye fail thereof, take ye a maid
E’en from a man of other race as victim,
An he shall give her willingly to slay.
And the story goes on to tell how in the end Aristodemus devoted his own daughter, and she became the accepted victim.
Here Pausanias, it will be noticed, does not give any reason for the sacrifice being required. But three points in his narrative are highly suggestive. The story of the sacrifice follows immediately upon the mention of the building of new fortifications—and the foundation of what was to be practically a new city was eminently a question on which to consult the Delphic oracle; the powers to whom sacrifice is ordered are designated merely as νέρτεροι δαίμονες, the nearest equivalent in ancient Greek to genii; and the time of the sacrifice is to be night, when, according to modern belief, genii are most active. If then modern superstition can ever teach us anything about ancient religion, it supplies the clue here. The maiden was to be sacrificed to the genii of Mount Ithome to ensure the stability of the new fortifications.
Now if my interpretation of this story is right and the practice of human sacrifice to genii was known in ancient Greece, the transition from the worship of genii in the form of snakes or dragons to the worship of tutelary heroes or gods in human likeness is readily explained on the analogy of a similar transition in modern belief. What was originally the victim was mistaken for the genius. The same confusion of thought, by which, in one version of ‘the Bridge of Arta,’ the genius in person demands a human victim and yet afterwards the victim speaks of herself as becoming the genius of the bridge, can be detected even in the oracle given to the Messenians. ‘If ye fail to find a maid of the blood of the Aepytidae,’ it said, ‘ye may take the daughter of a man of other lineage, provided that he give her willingly for sacrifice.’ Why the condition? Why ‘willingly’ only? Because, I think, even the Delphic oracle halted between two opinions—between the conception of the maiden as a victim to appease angry genii and the belief that the dead girl herself would become the guardian-daemon of the stronghold.
Let us read another story from Pausanias[717]: ‘At the base of Mount Cronius, on the north side (of the Altis at Olympia), between the treasuries and the mountain, there is a sanctuary of Ilithyia, and in it Sosipolis, a native daemon of Elis, is worshipped. To Ilithyia they give the surname “Olympian,” and elect a priestess to minister to her year by year. The old woman too who waits upon Sosipolis is bound by Elean custom to chastity in her own person, and brings water for the bathing of the god and serves him with barley-cakes kneaded with honey. In the front part of the temple, which is of double construction, is an altar of Ilithyia, and entrance thereto is public; but in the inner part Sosipolis is worshipped, and only the woman who serves the god may enter, and she only with her head and face covered by a white veil. And while she does so, maidens and married women wait in the temple of Ilithyia and sing a hymn; incense of all sorts is also offered to him, but no libations of wine. An oath also at the sanctuary of Sosipolis is taken on very great occasions.
‘It is said that when the Arcadians had once invaded Elis, and the Eleans lay encamped opposite to them, a woman came to the generals of the Eleans, with a child at her breast, and said that, though she was the mother of the child, she offered it, bidden thereto by dreams, to fight on the side of the Eleans. And those in command, trusting the woman’s tale, put the child in the forefront of the army naked. Then the Arcadians came to the attack, and lo! straightway the child was changed into a serpent. And the Arcadians, dismayed at the sight, turned to flight, and were pressed by the Eleans, who won a signal victory and gave to the god the name of Sosipolis (“saviour of the state”). And at the place where the serpent disappeared in the ground after the battle they set up the sanctuary; and along with him they took to worshipping Ilithyia, because she was the goddess who had brought the boy into the world.’
Is this story complete, or did Pausanias’ informants suppress one material point out of shame? How came a mortal infant to assume the form of a serpent which is proper only to apparitions from the lower world? The missing episode is, I believe, the sacrifice of the child, which having been offered willingly became after death a daemon friendly to the Eleans and fought, in the form of a serpent, on their side. Human sacrifice before a battle was not unknown in ancient Greece[718], but by Pausanias’ time the inhabitants of Elis might well have hesitated to impute to their forefathers so barbarous a custom, and have modified the story by omitting even that incident which alone could make it harmonise with ancient religious ideas[719].
A similar view has been taken of another story of Pausanias[720], also from Elis. ‘Oxylus (the king of Elis), they say, had two sons Aetolus and Laias. Aetolus died before his parents and was buried by them in a tomb which they caused to be made exactly in the gate of the road to Olympia and the sanctuary of Zeus. The cause of their burying him thus was an oracle which forbade the corpse to be either within or without the city. And up to my time the governor of the gymnasium still makes annual offerings to Aetolus as a hero.’ Commenting on this passage Dr Frazer[721] says, ‘The spirit of the dead man was probably expected to guard the gate against foes.... It is possible that in this story of the burial of Aetolus in the gate we have a faded tradition of an actual human sacrifice offered when the gate was built.’ Certainly the facts that Aetolus was young and that he was not head of the royal house make his elevation to the rank of tutelary hero after death difficult to understand on any other hypothesis; and it should be noted too that the oracle, in obedience to which his tomb was made in the gateway, probably came, as the preceding context suggests, from Delphi, that same shrine which was responsible for the sacrifice of Aristodemus’ daughter in the Messenian war.
Thus there is some probability that in ancient, as in modern, Greece the genius was sometimes superseded by the victim offered to him, but bequeathed to his successor something of his own character. The victim, now become a hero, manifested himself in the old-established guise of a serpent, and, if we may judge from the case of Sosipolis at Olympia, continued to be fed with honey-cakes, the same food which had been considered the appropriate diet for the original snake-genii such as those dwelling in the Erechtheum. But, when once the transition of worship was well advanced, the power to assume serpent-form was naturally extended to all tutelary heroes and even to gods; to have been sacrificed was no longer the sole qualifying condition. The hero Cychreus went to the help of the Athenians at Salamis in the form of a serpent[722]. Two serpents were the incarnations of the heroes Trophonius and Agamedes at the oracle of Lebadea[723]. Amphiaraus was represented by a snake on the coins of Oropus. An archaic relief of the sixth century B.C. in the Museum of Sparta, to which Miss Harrison has recently called attention, represents ‘a male and a female figure seated side by side on a great throne-like chain.... Worshippers of diminutive size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that may be a cake, an egg, or a fruit.... It is clear that we have ... representations of the dead, but the dead conceived of as half-divine, as heroized—hence their large size as compared with that of their worshipping descendants. They are κρείττονες, “Better and Stronger Ones.” The artist of the relief is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated figures, is a great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. From the edge of his lower lip hangs down a long beard, a decoration denied by nature. The intention is clear; he is a human snake, the vehicle, the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost[724].’
In this relief the offerings depicted also are, I think, no less instructive than the bearded snake. If we may suppose that the somewhat indeterminate object, cake, egg, or fruit, was intended for a honey-cake, the offerings combine that which was the accustomed food of snake-genii in ancient times with a cock, the victim most frequently sacrificed to the same genii at the present day.
Of gods, Asclepius, perhaps because he began life as a hero, was most frequently represented in serpent-form. It was in this guise that he came to Sicyon, Epidaurus Limera, and Rome[725]; and in later times Lucian tells a humorous tale of how an impostor effected by trickery a supposed re-incarnation of Asclepius in snake-form before the very eyes of the people out of whose superstitions he made a living and indeed a fortune[726]. Here again, if we may argue from modern custom, the serpent-form carried with it the traditional offering of a ‘cock to Asclepius.’ But other gods too had sometimes their attendant snakes, as had Asclepius at Epidaurus; and in every case it is likely that the particular god had originally dispossessed a primitive snake-genius, but inherited from him and retained for a time in local cults the form of a snake; until, as the conception of the gods became more and more anthropomorphic, the snake ceased to be a manifestation of the god himself and became merely his minister or his symbol. Even Zeus himself, under the title of Meilichios, is proved by two reliefs found at the Piraeus to have been figured for a time by his worshippers as a snake[727].
In many such cases doubtless the substitution of the cult of a new and named god for that of a primitive and nameless genius explains adequately the incomer’s inheritance and temporary retention of the snake-form; but in the case of tutelary heroes, above all, the analogy of modern folk-lore, in which the human victim is sometimes erroneously elevated to the rank of guardian-genius, supplies, I think, the right clue to the process by which in ancient times the snake came to be the recognised incarnation of the spirits of dead men and heroes.
The genii of water, to whom we now turn, are sometimes imagined in the form of dragons or of bulls, but more often by far in human or quasi-human shape. An exception to the general rule must of course be made in the case of the genii of bridges, if, as I suppose, they were originally identical with the genii of those rivers which the bridges span; for these, as I have said, are usually dragons. But if in this case there is a difference in outward appearance, there is a general agreement at any rate in characteristics; for the genii of water are no less hostile to man than those who demand human sacrifice as the price of their permission to build a bridge.
At Kephalóvryso in Aetolia the genii of a river were described to me as red, grinning devils who might often be seen sitting in the bed of the stream beneath the water. They were believed to mate with Lamiae who infested several caves on the bank of the river; and together these two kinds of monster would feed on the bodies of men whom they had dragged into the river and drowned.
But far more frequently the genii of water, and especially of wells, appear in the form of Arabs (Ἀράπηδες), and may be seen sometimes smoking long pipes in the depths. They have the power of transforming themselves into any shape. At one time they assume dragon-form and terrorise a whole country side; at another they adopt the guise of a lovely maiden weeping beside a well, and, on pretence of having dropped into it a ring, induce gallant and unwary men to descend to their death[728]; for when once the Arab has entrapped them in his well he feeds upon them or smokes them in lieu of tobacco in his pipe.
How Arabs have come to find a place among the genii of modern Greece is a question which must be answered in one of two ways. Either during the Turkish domination of Greece the Arab slaves, who were to be found in every wealthy house, were suspected by the Christian population of possessing magical powers, and from being magicians were elevated, as the Striges often were in mediaeval and modern Greece, to the rank of demons; or else they are another example of the transmutation of victims into genii. For several reasons I incline to the latter explanation. First, these Arabs are most commonly associated with wells, and for the sinking of a well, no less than for the erection of a building or the opening of a quarry, a victim would naturally be required. Secondly, an animal victim is for choice of a black or dark colour, and, by parity of reasoning, among human victims an Arab (or other man of dark colour, for the word Arab is used popularly of all such) would be preferable to a white man. Thirdly, it was reported from Zacynthos only a generation ago that a strong feeling still existed there in favour of sacrificing a Mohammedan or a Jew at the foundation of important bridges and other buildings[729]; and there is a legend of a black man having been actually immured in the bridge of an aqueduct near Lebadea in Boeotia[730]. Lastly, I heard from a shepherd belonging to Chios the story of a house in that island haunted by beings whom he called indifferently Arabs[731] and vrykólakes. He himself had been mad for eight months from the shock of seeing them, and four of his friends who visited the house to discover the cause of his disaster were similarly afflicted. The demons were finally laid to rest by an old man driving a flock of goats through the house[732]. Now vrykólakes, with whom I shall deal at length later on, are persons resuscitated after death who issue from their graves; and among those who are predisposed to such reappearance are men who have met with a violent death. The identification therefore of Arabs with vrykólakes in this story suggests that an Arab victim sacrificed at the foundation of some building might become the genius of it—not in this case the beneficent guardian of it, but owing to his violent death a malicious and hurtful monster. On this evidence I incline to the view that the Arabs who now form a class of genii were originally the human victims preferred at the sinking of wells—a piece of engineering, it must be remembered, of first-rate importance in a country as dry as Greece—and that, when once these genii had become associated with water, the popular imagination soon assigned them to rivers and natural springs no less than to wells.
The genii of rivers sometimes appear also in the shape of bulls, though as I have already remarked this type of genius is far more commonly associated with churches. Possibly in some cases the fact that the church was built in the neighbourhood of some sacred spring, whose miraculous virtue was of older date and repute than Christianity, first caused the transference; but at any rate some rivers still retain this type of genius, the type under which river gods were regularly represented in ancient times. In this connexion a story entitled ‘the ox-headed man[733]’ and narrated to me at Goniá in the island of Santorini deserves mention.
A princess and a poor girl once agreed that when they were married, if of their respective first-born the one should be a boy and the other a girl, these two should be married. Now, as it chanced, princess and peasant-maid were both wed on the same day, but for a long time both remained childless. Then at last they prayed to the Panagia, the princess for a child even if it were but a girl, the peasant for a son even if he were but half a man; and their prayers were answered; for the poor woman bore a son with the head of an ox, while the princess was blest with a beautiful daughter.
When the two children were grown up, the poor woman went one day to claim the fulfilment of the agreement, and the princess, or rather now the queen, went to ask her husband. He however objected to the suitor on the grounds of personal appearance, and stipulated that he should at least first perform certain feats to prove his worthiness. The first task was to build a palace of pearls, the second to plant the highest mountain of Santorini (μέσο βουνί, ‘central mountain,’ as it is locally called) with trees, and the third to border all the roads of the island with flowers. For each labour one single night was the limit of time. But the ox-headed man was equal to the work, and having accomplished it came riding on a white horse to claim his bride. The king however, who had imposed these three labours in full assurance that the unseemly suitor would fail, now flatly refused to abide by his promise, and the man retired disconsolate and disappeared none knew whither.
The young princess was much affected at the unfair treatment of her lover, and each day she grew more and more melancholy. But finally she hit upon a means of cheering herself. She proposed to her father that they should leave the palace and start an inn, not for money, but for the sake of the amusement to be derived from the stories and witty sayings of the guests. The king consented, and the inn was set up.
Now one day a boy who had been fishing dropped his rod into the river, and having dived in after it came to a flight of stairs at the bottom. Having walked down forty steps, he entered a large room where sat the ox-headed man, who talked with him and told him that he was waiting there for a princess who came not. The boy then returned without hurt, and on his way home had to pass the inn. Having turned in there, he was asked by the princess to tell her something amusing. He replied however that he knew no stories, but would recount to her an adventure which had just befallen him. In the course of the story the princess recognised that what the boy called the genius of the river (τὸ στοιχειὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ) could be no other than her lover, and having been straightway conducted to the spot, found and married the ox-headed man, and in his palace under the river lived happily ever afterwards—“but” (as Greek fairy-tales often end) “we here much more happily.”
It is curious that Santorini of all places should be the source of this story; for the island does not possess a stream. Locally however certain gullies by which the island is intersected are known as rivers (ποταμοί)[734], and after unusually heavy rain they might perhaps form torrents; at any rate one known as ‘the evil river’ (ὁ κακὸς ποταμός) is frequently mentioned in popular traditions as a real river. Possibly the tradition is accurate; for the volcanic nature of the island would readily account for the disappearance of a single stream[735]. But the importance of the story lies in the mention of an ox-headed man as genius of a river. The fact that he is made the son of a peasant-woman need not concern us; the first part of the story is probably adapted from some other folk-tale with a view to account for the wooing of a princess by so ill-favoured a suitor. In the latter part we have a more ancient motif, the wedding of a mortal maid with a river-god. If only it were mentioned in this tale that, besides the power of performing miraculous tasks, the bull-headed man had the faculty, which modern genii possess, of transforming himself into other shapes, we should have a complete parallel (save in the princess’ willingness to wed) with the wooing of Deianira by the river-god Achelous; “for he,” says she, “in treble shapes kept seeking me from my sire, coming now in true bull-form, now as a coiling serpent of gleaming hues, anon with human trunk and head of ox[736].” The genii of rivers have not, it would seem, changed their forms and attributes, save for the admission of Arabs to their number, from the age of Sophocles to this day.
The third class of genius which we have to notice is terrestrial, inhabiting mountains, rocks, caves, and any other grim and desolate places. These genii are the most frequent of all, and are known as dragons. Not of course that all dragons are terrestrial; the dragon-form has already been mentioned among the forms proper to the genii of springs and wells, and also as a shape assumed at will by the Arabs who more frequently occupy those haunts. But terrestrial genii, in whatever place they make their lair—and no limit can be set to such places—are far most commonly pictured as dragons; and I have therefore preferred to speak of the dragons in general here, rather than among the genii of either buildings or water.
The term δράκος or δράκοντας[737] indicates to the Greek peasant a monster of no more determinate shape than does the word ‘dragon’ to ourselves. The Greek word however differs, and has always differed, from the English form of it in one respect, namely that it is often employed in a strict and narrow sense to denote a ‘serpent’ as distinguished from a small snake (in modern Greek φίδι, i.e. ὀφίδιον, the diminutive of the ancient ὄφις). On the other hand, a Greek ‘dragon,’ in the widest sense of the term, is sometimes distinctly anthropomorphic in popular stories, and is made to boil kettles and drink coffee without any sense of impropriety. It is in fact only from the context of a story that it is possible to determine in what shape the dragon is imagined; in general it is neither flesh nor fowl nor good red devil; heads and tails, wings and legs, teeth and talons, are assigned to it in any number and variety; it breathes air and fire indifferently; it sleeps with its eyes open and sees with them shut; it makes war on men and love to women; it roars or it sings, and there is little to choose between the two performances; for the lapse of centuries, it seems, has in no wise mellowed its voice[738]. The stories of the common-folk are full of these monsters’ savagery and treachery[739]; for it is the dragons, above all other supernatural beings, who provide the wandering hero of the fairy-tales with befitting adventures and tests of prowess.
A common motif of such stories is provided by the belief that dragons are the guardians of buried treasure. When a man in a dream has had revealed to him the whereabouts of buried treasure, his right course is to go to the spot without breathing to anyone a hint of his secret, and there to slay a cock or other animal such as is offered at the laying of foundation-stones, in order to appease the genius (which is almost always a dragon, though an Arab is occasionally substituted) before he ventures to disturb the soil. This is the very superstition which Artemidorus had in mind when he interpreted dreams about dragons to denote ‘wealth and riches, because dragons make their fixed abode over treasures[740].’ Having complied with these conditions the digger may hope to bring gold to light; but if he have previously betrayed to anyone his expectations or have failed to propitiate the dragon, the old proverb is fulfilled, ἄνθρακες ὁ θησαυρός[741], his treasure turns out to be but ashes (κάρβουνα).
The guardianship likewise of gardens wherein flow ‘immortal waters’ or grows ‘immortal fruit’ is the province of dragons. In Tenos a typical story concerning them is told in several versions[742]. The hero of them all bears the name of Γιαννάκης or ‘Jack’ (a familiar diminutive of Ἰωάννης, ‘John’)—a name commonly given in Greek fairy-tales to the performer of Heraclean feats. The hero who, after discovering that his youngest sister is a Strigla, has fled with his mother, the queen, from the palace where they were in imminent danger of being devoured[743], comes to a castle occupied by forty dragons. The prince straightway attacks them single-handed and slays, so he thinks, all of them, but in reality one has only feigned to be dead and so escapes to a hole beneath the castle, of which Jack now becomes the master. The remaining dragon however ventures forth, when the prince is gone out to the chase, and makes love to the queen, and after a while dragon and queen knowing that the prince would be incensed at their intrigue conspire to kill him. To this end the queen on her son’s return pretends to be ill, and in response to his enquiries tells him that the only thing that can heal her is ‘immortal water[744],’ which, as her paramour, the dragon, knows, is to be found only in a distant garden guarded by one or more other dragons. The prince at once undertakes to obtain the desired remedy, and is directed by a witch (who in some versions appears as the impersonation of his τύχη or ‘Fortune’) whither to go and how to deal with the dragons. These accordingly he slays or eludes, and so returns home unhurt bringing the immortal water. Then once more the dragon and the queen take counsel together, and the pretence of illness is repeated with a demand this time for some immortal fruit or herb[745] known to be guarded in the same way as the water; and once more the prince sets out and circumvents the dragons in some new fashion.
Between such stories and the ancient fable of Heracles’ journey to the land of the Hesperides in search of the golden apples, and of his victory over the guardian-dragon Ladon, the connexion is self-evident. Whether that connexion is one of direct lineage, is less certain. More probably, I think, a form of this same story was already current in an age to which the name of Heracles was as unknown as that of the modern Jack; and just as the story of Peleus and Thetis became the classical example of the winning of a nymph to wife by a mortal man[746], so the myth, by which the exploit of bearing off wonderful fruit from the custody of a dragon was numbered among the labours of Heracles, is nothing more than the authorised version, so to speak, of a fairy-tale that might have been heard of winter-nights in Greek cottage-homes any time between the Pelasgian and the present age.
Daemons of the air, the fourth class of genius which we have to consider, have been acknowledged ever since the time of Hesiod and doubtless from a period far anterior to that. In his theology it was the lot of the first race of men in the golden age to become after death daemons ‘clothed in air and going to and fro through all the world’ as good guardians of mortal men. But the goodness which Hesiod attributes to the genii of the air was never, I suspect, an essential trait in their character. In Hesiod it is a corollary of the statement that they are the spirits of men who belonged to the golden age; but there is no reason to suppose that the common-folk ever regarded them as more beneficent than other gods and daemons. At any rate at the present day the ἀερικά, or genii of the air, are no better disposed towards mankind than any other supernatural beings.
Of this class as a whole little can be said. The word ἀερικό is applied to almost any apparition too vague and transient to be more clearly defined. It suggests something ‘clothed in air,’ something less tangible, less discernible, than most of the beings whom the peasant recognises and fears. The limits of its usage are hard to fix. It may properly include a Nereid whose passing through the air is the whirlwind, and it will equally certainly exclude a callicantzaros or a dragon. Yet even the Nereids are more substantial than the genii of the air in their truest form; for the assaults of Nereids upon men and women are made, as we have seen, from without[747], while genii of the air are more often supposed to ‘possess’ men in the same way as do devils, and to be liable to exorcism.
But, if the class as a whole is too vague and shadowy in the popular imagination to be capable of exact description, one division of it is more clearly defined and has a generally acknowledged province of activity. These particular aërial genii are known as Telonia (τελώνια or, more rarely, τελωνεῖα). They cannot claim equal antiquity with some of their fellows, for they are, it would seem, a by-product of Christianity, with a certain accretion however of pagan superstition.
The origin of the name Telonia is not in dispute. It means frankly and plainly ‘custom-houses.’ Such is the bizarre materialism of the Greek imagination that the soul in its journeys no less than the body is believed to encounter the embarrassment of custom-houses. An institution which of all things mundane commands least sentiment and sympathy has actually found a place in popular theology. Many of the people indeed at the present day, as I know from enquiry, have ceased to connect their two usages of the word; but others accept as reasonable the belief that the soul in its voyage after death up from the earth to the presence of God must bear the scrutiny of aërial customs-officers.
But, apart from modern belief, the apotheosis of the douane is amply proved by passages cited by Du Cange[748] from early Christian authors. ‘Some spirits,’ says one[749], ‘have been set on the earth, and some in the water, and others have been set in the air, even those that are called “aërial customs-officers” (ἐναέρια Τελώνια).’ Another[750] speaks of ‘the Judge and the prosecutions by the toll-collecting spirits.’ Yet another[751] explains the belief in fuller detail: ‘as men ascend, they find custom-houses guarding the way with great care and obstructing the soaring souls, each custom-house examining for one particular sin, one for deceit, another for envy, another for slander, and so on in order, each passion having its own inspectors and assessors[752].’ Again a prayer for the use of the dying contains the same idea: ‘Have mercy on me, all-holy angels of God Almighty, and save me from all evil Telonia, for I have no works to weigh against my wrong-doings[753].’ Appeal in support of this belief was made even to the authority of Christ as given in the words, ‘Thou fool, this night they require thy soul of thee[754],’ where the commentators explained the vague plural as implying some such subject as ‘toll-collectors’ or ‘custom-house officers[755].’
But the belief does not stop here. One does not pass the custom-houses of this world, or at any rate of Greece, without some expenditure in duty or in douceur; and the same apparently holds true of the celestial custom-houses. Hence in some places the belief has generated a practice, or, to speak more exactly, has breathed a new spirit into the old practice of providing the dead with money. My view of the origin of this practice has already been explained; I have given reasons for holding that the coin placed in the mouth of the dead was simply a charm to prevent evil spirits from entering, or the soul from re-entering, into the body, and that the interpretation of the custom, according to which the coin was the fee of the ferryman Charon, was of comparatively late date. At the present day Charon in the rôle of ferryman is almost forgotten; but in his place the Telonia seem locally to have become the recipients of the fee, and the old custom has thus received a second and equally erroneous explanation.
This may have been the idea in the mind of my informant who vaguely said that a coin placed in the mouth of the dead was ‘good because of the aërial beings[756].’ If the particular aërial beings whom he had in mind were the Telonia, he no doubt thought of the coin as a fee payable to them, though in that case it is somewhat strange that he should not have used the name which actually denotes their toll-collecting functions.
But from other sources at any rate comes evidence of a less ambiguous kind that the idea of paying the Telonia for passage is, or has been, a real motive in the minds of the peasantry. In Chios (where however the object actually placed in the mouth of the dead is clearly understood as a precaution against a devil entering the body) it is believed that the soul after death remains for forty days in the neighbourhood of its old habitation, the body, and then making its way to Hades has to pass the Telonia. Happy the soul that makes its voyage on Friday, for then the activities of the Telonia (who in the conception of the islanders are clearly evil spirits and not, as sometimes, the ministers of God) are restrained. But, to appease the Telonia and to ensure the safe passage of the soul, money is distributed to the poor[757]. The same usage obtains also at Sinasos in Cappadocia, and there the money so distributed is actually called τελωνιακά, ‘duty paid at the customs[758].’ The fact that in both these cases the money is now given in alms instead of being buried with the body is clearly a result of Christian influence; before that change was effected, it is reasonably likely that the widely-known practice of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead was explained in some places, though erroneously, by the belief that the dead must pay their way through the aërial custom-houses. The term περατίκι, ‘passage-money,’ by which, in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, is denoted the coin still in that district buried with the dead, has reference possibly to the same Telonia rather than to Charon[759].
Another and wholly different aspect of the Telonia concerns the living and not the dead, while it still exhibits them as true genii of the air. Any striking phenomena of the heavens at night, such as shooting-stars or comets, are believed to be manifestations of the Telonia[760]; but most dreaded of all is the phenomenon known to us as St Elmo’s light, the flame that sometimes flickers in time of storm about the mast-head and yards. This light, the Greek sailor thinks, portends an immediate onset of malevolent aërial powers, whom he straightway tries to scare away by every means in his power, by invocation of saints and incantation against the demons, by firing of guns, and, best of all, by driving a black-handled knife (which is in the Cyclades thought doubly efficacious if an onion has recently been peeled with it) into the mast. For he no longer discriminates as did the Greek mariner of old; then the appearance of two such flames was greeted with gladness as a manifestation of the Dioscuri, the saviours from storm and tempest, and evil was portended only if there appeared a single flame, the token of Helena[761], who wrecked as surely as her twin brothers guarded; now the phenomenon in any form bodes naught but ill. This change is probably due to Christian influences; the seaman no longer looks to any pagan power for succour in time of peril; he accounts St Nicholas his friend and saviour; and the Telonia, who in this province of their activity represent the older order of deities, have become by contrast man’s enemies.
Other vague and incorrect usages of the term Telonia are also recorded. Sometimes it may be heard as a synonym for δαιμόνια, any non-Christian deities. In Myconos it is said to have been applied to the genii of springs[762]. In Athens men used to speak of Telonia of the sea, who like the Callicantzari were abroad only from Christmas until the blessing of the waters at Twelfth-night; and during this time ships were wont to be kept at anchor and secure from their attacks[763]. A belief is also mentioned by Pouqueville[764], in a very confused passage, that children who die unbaptised become Telonia; but the statement is corroborated by Bernhard Schmidt[765], who adduces information of the same belief existing in Zacynthos. The idea at the root of it probably was that unbaptised children could not pass the celestial customs, and were detained there on their road to the other world in order to assist in obstructing the passage of other souls. But these are local variations of the main belief, and, so far as I can see, are of little importance. In general the Telonia are a species of aërial genius, and their two activities consist in the collecting of dues from departed souls and assaults upon mariners.
There remain only for consideration the genii of human beings, or the attendant spirits to whom is committed in some way the guidance of men’s lives. To some of them the name genius (i.e. στοιχειό) would hardly perhaps be extended by the peasants; but they all bear the same kind of relation towards men, and may therefore conveniently be grouped together for discussion.
The best example which I know of an acknowledged genius attached to a man is in a story in Hahn’s collection[766], which tells of an old wizard whose life was bound up with that of a ten-headed snake which lived beneath a threshing-floor. Here the monstrous nature of the genius is doubtless intended to match the character of the wizard; ordinary men, unversed in magic, may have genii of a less complex pattern. Thus the snake which so commonly acts as genius to a house is also in many cases regarded as the genius of the head or some other member of the household. When therefore the death-struggle of any person is prolonged, this is sometimes set down to the unwillingness of the genius to permit his death; and in extreme cases of protracted agony recourse has before now been had to a priest, who, entering the sick man’s room alone, reads a special prayer for the sufferer’s release, and by virtue of this solemn office causes the house-snakes, who are pagan genii, to burst[767]. With their disruption of course the soul of the dying man is at once set free.
But the guardian spirits of whom the peasants most commonly speak belong to the personnel of Christian theology or demonology, and are therefore not actually numbered among genii. These are angels, two of whom are allotted to each man, the one good (ὁ καλὸς ἄγγελος) and the other bad (ὁ κακὸς ἄγγελος). But though the designation genius is not applied to them, in functions angels and genii do not differ. To them belongs the control of a man’s life, the one guiding him in the way of righteousness, and the other diverting him to the pitfalls of vice. Their presence is ever constant, but seldom visible. Sometimes indeed, in stories at any rate, we hear of the good angel appearing to a man and rewarding him in his old age for a virtuous life[768]; and in general men born on Saturday, σαββατογεννημένοι, are reputed to be ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι[769] and endowed with special powers of seeing and dealing with the supernatural. But most commonly the power to see the guardian angel is granted only to the dying, and the vision is a warning that the end is near. So, when the gaze of a dying man becomes abstracted and fixed, they say in some places βλέπει τὸν ἄγγελό του, or in one word ἀγγελοθωρεῖ[770], ‘he sees his angel,’ or again ἀγγελοσκιάζεται[771], ‘he is terrified of an angel.’ In these expressions it is not clear which of the two angels is intended; but, to judge from other expressions, popular belief recognises the activity of the one or the other according to the peace or pain of the death. ‘He is borne away by an angel,’ ἀγγελοφορᾶται[772], suggests a quiet passing, as of Lazarus who was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; while the word ἀγγελομαχεῖ, ‘he is fighting with an angel,’ an expression used in Laconia of a protracted death-struggle, and again ἀγγελοκρούσθηκε[773], ‘he was stricken by an angel,’ a term which denotes a sudden death, argue rather the presence of the evil angel.
Another kind of genius sometimes associated with men is the ἴσκιος (the modern form of σκιά), the ‘shadow’ personified. The phrase ἔχει καλὸ ἴσκιο, ‘he has a good shadow,’ is used of a man who enjoys good fortune, and he himself is described sometimes as καλοΐσκι̯ωτος[774], ‘good-shadowed,’ that is, ‘lucky.’ But apparently a man may also get into trouble with this shadow no less than with an angel. The word ἰσκιοπατήθηκε, ‘he has been trampled upon by his shadow[775],’ is used occasionally of a man who has been stricken down by some sudden, but not necessarily fatal, illness such as epilepsy or paralysis. This personification of the shadow as genius is perhaps responsible in some measure for the fear which the peasant feels of having the foundation-stone of a building laid upon his shadow; but, as I have said above, the principle of sympathetic magic will explain the cause of fear without this supposition.
To these genii might reasonably be added the Fate (ἡ Μοῖρα or, more rarely, ἡ Τύχη) of each individual. But these lesser Fates, as well as the great Three, have already been discussed, and there is nothing to add here save that by virtue of the close connexion of each lesser Fate with the life of one man these too might be numbered among genii.
The same belief in a guardian-deity presiding over each human life is to be found throughout ancient Greek literature. In Homer the name for such a genius is Κὴρ (at any rate if it be of an evil sort), in later writers δαίμων—both of them vague terms which embrace other kinds of deities as well, yet not so vague but that with the aid of context we can readily discover in them the equivalent of the ‘guardian-angel’ or other modern genius. From Homer onwards the word λαγχάνειν is regularly used of the allotment of each human life from the moment of birth to one of these guardians, and the belief in their attendance upon men throughout, and even after, life seems to have had general acceptance. In the Iliad the wraith of Patroclus is made to speak of the hateful Ker to whom he was allotted at the hour of birth[776], and the Ker here mentioned is not, I think, merely fate in the abstract but as truly a person as that baneful Ker of battle and carnage ‘who wore about her shoulders a robe red with the blood of heroes[777].’ After Homer the word δαίμων is preferred, but there is no change in the idea. The famous saying of Heraclitus, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμον, ‘the god that guides man’s lot is character,’ is in no wise dark, but Plato throws even clearer light upon the popular belief in guardian-daemons. ‘It is said that at each man’s death his daemon, the daemon to whom he had been allotted for his lifetime, has the task of guiding him to some appointed place[778],’ where the souls of men must assemble for judgement. Here the words ‘it is said’ indicate the popular source of the doctrine; and this is confirmed by another passage in which Plato[779] protests against the fatalism involved in the allotment of souls to particular daemons, and prefers to hold that the soul may choose its own guardian. Again in a fragment of Menander there is a simple statement of the belief in a form which robs fatalism of its gloom:
Beside each man a daemon takes his stand
E’en at his birth-hour, through life’s mysteries
A guide right good[780].
But there were others who did not take so cheerful a view, at any rate of their own guardian-deities; ‘alas for the most cruel daemon to whom I am allotted[781]’ is a complaint of a type by no means rare in Greek literature, and the word κακοδαίμων came as readily as εὐδαίμων to men’s lips[782].
From these passages it is evident that in general each man was believed to have one, and only one, attendant genius, and his happiness or misery to depend on the character of the guardian allotted to him by fate. But sometimes this injustice of destiny was obviated by a belief similar to the modern belief in both good and bad angels in attendance on each man. The comment of Servius on Vergil’s line, ‘Quisque suos patimur manes[783],’ sets forth this view: ‘when we are born two Genii are allotted to us, one who exhorts us to good, the other who perverts us to evil.’
As in modern so in ancient times these genii were rarely visible to the men whom they guarded. The genius of Socrates, which, like those of other men past and present, had been, so he held, divinely appointed to wait upon him from his childhood onward[784], spoke to him indeed in a voice which he could hear[785] (just perhaps as the priestess of Delphi heard the voice of Apollo[786]), but ever remained unseen.
CHAPTER III.
THE COMMUNION OF GODS AND MEN.
Ἔτι τοίνυν καὶ θυσίαι πᾶσαι καὶ οἷς μαντικὴ ἐπιστατεῖ—ταῦτα δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ θεους τε καὶ ἀνθρώπους πρὸς ἀλλήλους κοινωνία—οὐ περὶ ἄλλο τί ἐστιν ἢ περὶ Ἔρωτος φυλακήν τε καὶ ἴασιν.
Plato, Symposium, p. 188.
The short sketch which has been given of the attitude of the Greek peasantry towards the Christian Godhead and all the host of assistant saints, and also the more detailed account of those pagan deities or demons whom the common-folk’s awe, not unmingled with affection, has preserved from oblivion through so many centuries, have, I hope, justified the statement that the religion of Greece both is now, and—if a multitude of coincidences in the very minutiae of ancient and modern beliefs speak at all for the continuity of thought—from the dawn of Greek history onward through its brief bright noontide to its long-drawn dusk and night illumined even now only by borrowed lights has ever been, a form, and a little changed form, of polytheism.
Whatever be the merits and the demerits of such a religion in contrast with the worship of one almighty God, most thinkers will concede to it the property of bringing the divine element within more easy comprehension of the majority of mankind. Proper names, limited attributes, definite duties and spheres of work—these give a starting point from which the peasant can set out towards a conception of gods. He himself bears a name, he himself has qualities, he himself performs his round of work; and though his name be writ smaller than that of the being whom he strives to imagine—though his virtues and perhaps his vices be less pronouncedly white and black—though his daily task be more trivial—yet in one and all of these things he stands on common ground with his deities; they differ from him in degree rather than in kind; he has but to picture a race of beings somewhat stronger and somewhat nobler than the foremost of his own fellow-men, and these whom he thus imagines are gods. A single spirit omniscient and omnipotent is too distant, too inaccessible from any known ground. Lack of the capacity to form or to grasp lofty ideals carries with it at least the compensation of closer intimacy with the supernatural and the divine.
It may therefore be expected that in the course of the intellectual and spiritual development of any primitive people, the more accurately they learn to measure their own imperfections and limitations, and the more imaginatively they magnify the wisdom and power of their gods, the wider and more impassable grows the chasm that divides mortal from immortal, human from divine; communion of man and god becomes less frequent, less direct. Such certainly was the experience of the Greek nation in some measure; but, owing probably to an innate and persistent vanity which at all times has made the race blind to its own failings, that experience was less acute than in the case of other peoples. There had been days indeed when their gods walked the earth with men and counselled them in troubles and fought in their battles; there had been days when the chiefest of all the gods sought a hero’s aid against his giant foes; there had been days when men and women might aspire even to wedlock with immortals, and to possess children half-divine. In those days too death was not the only path by which the heavens or the house of Hades might be gained. Kings and prophets, warriors and fair women passed thither by grace of the gods living and unscathed; nay, even personal skill or prowess emboldened minstrel and hero to match themselves with the gods below, and wielding of club or sweeping of lyre sufficed to open the doors for their return to earth.
But those days soon passed; men walked and spoke and held open fellowship with the gods no more; the very poetry and imagination of the Greek temperament so fast outstripped in rapidity of development the growth of material or moral resources, that the rift between their religious ideals and the realities of their life and character ever widened, until the daily and familiar intercourse of their ancestors with the gods seemed to them a condition of life irretrievable and thenceforth impossible. This result was observed and remarked by the Greeks themselves, but the process by which it had come about was not agreed. To one school of thought, it was the degeneracy of mankind through successive ages—the golden age in which men lived as gods and passed hence, as it were in sleep, to become spirits clothed in air, administering upon earth the purposes of mighty Zeus—the silver age wherein childhood was still long and innocent, and, though men’s riper years brought cares and quarrels and indifference to holy things, yet when the earth covered them they were called blessed and received a measure of honour—the bronze age when all men’s minds were set on war and their stalwart arms were busy with brazen weapons, and by each other’s hands they were sent down to the chill dark house of Hades and their names were no more known—the age of heroes who were called half-divine, who fought in the Theban and the Trojan wars, and when the doom of death overtook them were granted a life apart from other men in the islands of the blest, because they had been nobler and more righteous than those of the age of bronze and had stemmed for a time the current of degeneracy—the fifth age in which the depravity of man grows apace and soon there will be nought but discord between father and son, and no regard will be paid to guest nor comrade nor brother, and children will slight their aged parents, and the voice of gods will be unknown to them[787]—to one school of thought, I say, it was simply and solely this decline of the human race, swift and only once checked, that was held accountable for their estrangement from the powers above them.
But such thinkers were in a minority. Humility and self-dissatisfaction were and are qualities foreign to the ordinary Greek. He observed the wide gulf that separated him from those whom he worshipped, but without any sense of unworthiness, without any depression of spirit. He was not despondent over his own shortcomings and limitations, but was filled rather with a larger complacency in the thought that, incapable though he might be to reproduce actually in his own life and character much of the beauty and nobility of his gods, he was so gifted in mind and godlike in understanding, that in his moments of highest imagination and most spiritual exaltation he could soar to that loftier plane whereon was enacted all the divine life, and could visualise his gods and feel the closeness of their presence. The motive of the highest acts of Greek worship seems to have been not the self-abasement of the worshipper and the glorification of the worshipped, but rather an obliteration of the distinctions between man and god, and a temporary attainment by the human of spiritual equality and companionship with the divine. The votary of Bacchus in his hours of wildest ecstacy enjoyed so completely this sense of equality and of real union with the god, that even to others it seemed fitting that he should be called by the god’s own name[788].
But the hours, in which the Greeks of the historical age attained by a sort of religious frenzy such intimacy with their gods as their ancestors were famed to have enjoyed all their life long, were few and far between. The means of communion had become in general less direct, less personal. Yet even so the desire for communion continued unabated, and the belief in it still pervaded every phase of life. Intellectual progress had curiously little effect upon the dominant religious ideas. A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would; and his work found a certain sanction in the appeal which it made to other men’s sense of truth and of beauty. But for the foundation the fiat of antiquity had been pronounced and was immutable. Plato’s reasoned exposition of the soul’s immortality culminates in an Apocalypse ratified by the old mythology; and a quotation from Homer ever served to quash or to confirm the subtlest argument.
That the foundation-stone was not, in the estimate of reason, well and truly laid, that the basis of religion was insecure, must have been obvious to many. Pindar saw it, and, by refusing to impute to the gods any deed or purpose which his own heart condemned as ungodly, strove to repair its defects; Euripides too saw it, and scoffed at those who would build on so unstable a base. But the mass of men, though they also must have seen, were little troubled, it would seem, either to demolish or to repair. They accepted the old beliefs and ceremonies because they were sanctioned by the authority or the experience of past ages; and if sober reasoning and criticism exposed flaws and inconsistencies therein, what matter? They were, as they still are, a people incapable of any mental equilibrium; the mood of the hour swayed them now to emotions, now to reasonings; they did not cultivate consistency; they could not sit still and preserve an even balance between the passions of the heart and the judgements of the intellect, but threw their whole selves into the one scale, and the other for the moment was as vanity.
In the whole complex and irrational scheme of religion thus accepted, nothing was more highly valued than the means by which divine counsel was obtained for the conduct both of public and of private affairs. Omens were regularly taken before battle, at the critical moment when we should prefer to trust experience and generalship. Oracles were consulted as to the sites for planting colonies, in cases where a surveyor’s report might have seemed more decisive. But the efficacy of these old methods of consulting the gods went almost unchallenged. It seems seldom to have occurred to men’s minds that those untoward signs in the victim’s entrails, which perhaps delayed tactics on which victory depended, were the symptoms of an internal disease and not the handiwork of a deity, or that the inferior and ambiguous verse, in which the gods condescended to give counsel, more often confused than confirmed human judgement. Even of the philosophers, according to Cicero[789], two only, Xenophanes and Epicurus, went so far as to deny the validity of all means of communion; and Socrates, for all his questioning and testing of truth, obeyed without question the whispered warnings of a daemon, and in deference to the ambiguous exhortations of a vision spent some of his last days in turning Aesop’s fables into verse, that so he might go into the presence of the gods with his conscience clear. Thus, though men no longer expected to look upon the faces or to hear the voices of the gods, they still felt them to be close at hand, easy of access, ready to counsel, to warn, to encourage; and the methods of communion, in proportion as they stand condemned by reason, commend so much the more the steady faith of the people who used them and never doubted their efficacy. The answer of the ordinary man to those critics, who questioned the validity of divination merely because they could not understand the way in which it operated, is well expressed by Cicero: ‘It is a poor sort of cleverness to try to upset by sophistry facts which are confirmed by the experience of ages. The reason of those facts I cannot discover; the dark ways of Nature, I suppose, conceal it from my view. God has not willed that I should know the reason, but only that I should use the means[790].’
The Greek nation saw many philosophies rise and fall, but it clung always to the religion which it had inherited. The doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, became for the Greek people as though they had never been; but the old polytheism of the Homeric and earlier ages lived. Faith justified by experience was a living force; the conclusions of reason a mere fabrication. And an essential part of that polytheism which was almost instinctive in the Greeks was their belief in the possibility of close and frequent communion with their gods.
Now the means of communion between men and gods are obviously twofold—the methods by which men make their communications to the gods, and the methods by which the gods make their communications to men. The former class of communications involve for the most part questions or petitions; the latter are mainly the responses thereto; and it would seem natural to consider them in that order. But inasmuch as more is known of the ancient methods by which the gods signified their will to men than of the reverse process, it will be convenient first to establish the unity of modern folklore with ancient religion in this division of the subject, and afterwards to discuss how any modern ideas concerning the means open to man of communicating with the gods may bear upon the less known corresponding department of ancient religion. For if we find that the theory no less than the practice of divination, that is, of receiving and interpreting divine messages, has been handed down from antiquity almost unchanged, there will be a greater probability that, along with the general modern system of sacrifices or offerings which accompany men’s petitions, a curious conception of human sacrifice in particular which I once encountered is also a relic of ancient religion.
The survival of divination then in its several branches first claims our attention. The various modes employed are for the most part enumerated by Aeschylus[791] in the passage where Prometheus recounts the subjects in which he claimed to have first instructed mankind: dreams and their interpretation; chance words (κληδόνες) overheard, often conveying another meaning to the hearer than that which the speaker intended; meetings on the road (ἐνόδιοι σύμβολοι), where the person or object encountered was a portent of the traveller’s success or failure in his errand; auspices in the strict sense of the word, observations, that is, of the flight and habits of birds; augury from a sacrificial victim, either by inspection of its entrails or by signs seen in the fire in which it was being consumed. To these arts Suidas[792] adds ‘domestic divination’ (οἰκοσκοπικόν)—the interpretation of various trivial incidents of domestic life—palmistry (χειροσκοπικόν), and divination from the twitching of any part of the body (παλμικόν). Finally of course there was direct inspiration (μαντική), either temporary, as in an individual seer, or permanent, as at the oracle of Delphi.
Whether the common-folk ever distinguished the comparative values of these many methods of divination may well be doubted. The Delphic oracle, I suspect, attained its high prestige more because it was ready to supply immediately on demand a more or less direct and detailed answer to a definite question, than because personal inspiration was held to be in any way a surer channel for divine communications than were other means of divination. Some thinkers indeed, chiefly of the Peripatetic school[793], were inclined to draw distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘skilled’ divination[794]. The ‘natural’ methods, including dreams and all direct inspiration, were accepted by them; the ‘skilled’ methods, those which required the services of a professional augur or interpreter, were disallowed. But the division proposed was in itself bad—for dreams do not by any means exclusively belong to the first class, but probably in the majority of cases require interpretation by experts—and, apart from that consideration, the distinction was the invention of a philosophical sect and not an expression of popular feeling. There is nothing to show that the common-folk, believing as they did in the practicability of communion with their gods, esteemed one means of divination as intrinsically more valuable than another.
Nor was there any logical reason for such discrimination. Granted that there were gods superior to man in knowledge and in power and also willing to communicate with him, no restriction could logically be set upon the means of communication which they might choose to adopt. There was no reason why they should speak by the mouth of a priestess intoxicated with mephitic vapours or disturb men’s sleep with visions rather than use the birds as their messengers or write their commandment on the intestines of a sacrificial victim.
A certain justification for accepting some means of divination, such as intelligible dreams, and for suspecting others, might certainly have been found in distrust of any human intermediary; vagrant and necessitous oracle-mongers infested the country; and even the priestess of Delphi, as history shows, was not always superior to political and pecuniary considerations. But experience of fraud did not apparently teach distrust; the fact that oracles and other means of divination were undoubtedly often abused did not cause the Greek people to reject the proper use of them; down to this day all the chief methods of ancient divination still continue. In some cases, we shall see, the modern employment of such methods is a mere survival of ancient custom without any intelligent religious motive; but in others there is abundant evidence that the modern folk are still actuated by the feelings which so dominated the lives of their ancestors—the belief in, and the desire for, close and frequent communion with the powers above.
Direct inspiration is a gift which at the present day a man is not inclined to claim for himself, though he will often attribute it to another; for it implies insanity. But though the gift is not therefore envied, it is everywhere respected. Mental derangement, which appears to me to be exceedingly common among the Greek peasants, sets the sufferer not merely apart from his fellows but in a sense above them. His utterances are received with a certain awe, and so far as they are intelligible are taken as predictions. He is in general secure from ill-treatment, and though he do no work he is not allowed to want. The strangest case which I encountered was that of a man, unquestionably mad, who wandered from place to place and seemed to be known everywhere. I met him in all three times, in Athens, in Tenos, and in Thessaly. He had no fixed home, did no work, and was usually penniless; but a wild manner, a rolling eye, and an extraordinary power of conducting his part of a conversation in metrical, if not highly poetical, form sufficed to obtain for him lodging, food, and clothing, and even a free passage, it appeared, on the Greek coasting steamers. Whether the long monologues in verse in which he sometimes indulged were also improvisations, I could not of course tell; but once to have heard and seen his delivery of them was to understand why, among a superstitious people, he passed for a prophet. He was a modern type of those old seers whose name μάντεις was believed by Plato to have been formed from the verb μαίνεσθαι, ‘to be mad’; his frenzy really gave the appearance of inspiration.
Dreams furnish a more sober and naturally also a more general means of communion with the gods; and the belief in them as a channel of divine revelation is both firmly rooted and widely spread. This indeed is only natural. The change from paganism to Christianity, even if it had been more thorough and complete than it actually has been, would probably not have affected this article of faith. So long as a people believe in any one or more deities not wholly removed from human affairs, it is logically competent for them to regard their dreams as a special communication to them from heaven; and Christianity, far from repudiating the old pagan idea, confirmed it by biblical authority. The Greek Church, as we shall see, has made effective use of it.
The degree of importance universally attached in old time to dreams is too well known to all students of Greek literature to call for comment. Artemidorus’ prefatory remarks to his Oneirocritica, or ‘Treatise on the interpretation of dreams,’ and his criticism of former exponents of the same science, would alone prove that public interest in the subject must indeed have been great to stimulate so serious and so large a literature. There is the same practical evidence of a similar interest in modern Greece. Books of the same nature are sought after and consulted no less eagerly now than then. A new edition of some Μέγας Ὀνειροκρίτης, or ‘Great Dream-interpreter,’ figures constantly in the advertisements of Athenian newspapers, and the public demand for such works is undeniable. In isolated homesteads, to which the Bible has never found its way, I have several times seen a grimy tattered copy of such a book preserved among the most precious possessions of the family, and honoured with a place on the shelf where stood the icon of the household’s patron-saint and whence hung his holy lamp.
One of the pieces of information most frequently imparted to men in dreams is the situation of some buried treasure. The precautions necessary for unearthing it, namely complete reticence as to the dream, and the sacrifice of a cock, have already been mentioned[795]. This kind of dream has been utilized by the Greek Church. There is no article of ecclesiastical property of more value than a venerable icon; to any church or monastery which aspires to become a great religious centre an ancient and reputable icon, competent to work miracles, is indispensable.
Now the most obvious way of obtaining such pictures is, it seems, to dig them up. A few weeks underground will have given the right tone to the crudest copy of crude Byzantine art, and all that is required, in order to determine the spot for excavation, is a dream on the part of some person privy to the interment. It was on this system that the miracle-working icon of Tenos came to be unearthed on the very day that the standard of revolt from Turkey was raised, thus making the island the home of patriotism as well as of religion. And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveller goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story, and if the picture in question happens to be of the Panagia, there is often an appendix to the effect that the painter of it was St Luke—an attribution which can only have been based on clerical criticism of the style. Inspection is now difficult; the old pagan custom of covering venerable statues with gold or silver foil by way of thank-offering[796] has, to avoid idolatry, been transferred to icons; and in many cases only the faces and the hands of the saints depicted are left visible, the outlines of the rest of the picture being merely incised upon the silver foil. But, with inspection thus limited, the layman does not detect in any crudity of style a sufficient reason why the saintly painter, if only he could have foreseen the ordinary decoration of Greek churches, should have had his productions put out of sight in the ground. Nevertheless the story of the origin of the icon is believed as readily as the story of its finding.
Nor is it only in stories that the discovery of icons in obedience to dreams is heard of. During my stay in Greece a village schoolmaster embarrassed the Education Office by applying for a week’s holiday in order to direct a party of his fellow-villagers in digging up an icon of which he had dreamt, and to build a chapel for it on the spot. It was felt that a body concerned with religious as well as secular instruction ought not to commit the impiety of refusing such a request, but it was feared that other schoolmasters would be encouraged to dream.
Besides those visions which are concerned with the finding of treasure or of icons, that class of dream also may be noticed in which is given some divine communication as to the healing of the sick. Many a time I have met in some sanctuary of miraculous repute peasants from a far-off village, who have travelled from one end of Greece to another, bringing wife or child, in the faith that mind will be restored or sickness healed; time after time their story is the same, that they were bidden in a dream to go and tarry so many days in such a church, and they have started off at once, obedient to what they feel to be a promise of divine help, begging their way may be for many days, but unflinchingly hopeful. And then comes the long sojourn in a strange village, for a mere visit is not always enough; weeks and months they wait, sleeping each night in the holy precincts and if possible at the foot of the icon, hoping and believing that some mysterious virtue of the place will heal the sufferer, or at the least that in a fresh dream they will be told what is next to be done. And if nothing happen—for now and then rest or change of air or, it may be, faith[797] effects the cure desired—they return home with hope lessened but belief unshaken, ready to obey again if another message be vouchsafed to them from the dream-land of heaven.
Such dreams as these are regarded as spontaneous revelations of the divine will, granted possibly in response to prayer, but in no way controlled or procured by any previous action of the dreamer. But there is one curious custom, observed by the girls of Greece, by which dreams are deliberately induced as a means of foreknowing their matrimonial destinies. On the eve of St Catharine’s day[798] most appropriately, for she is the patroness of all marrying and giving in marriage, but sometimes also on the first day of Lent[799], the girls knead and bake cakes (ἀρμυροκούλουρα) of which, as their name implies, the chief ingredient is salt. By consuming undue quantities of this concoction, and often by assuaging the consequent thirst with an equally undue quantity of wine, they produce a condition of body eminently suited to cause a troubled sleep, and, their minds being already absorbed in speculations on marriage, it is little wonder if their dreams reveal to them their future husbands. How far this custom is now taken seriously, I cannot determine; in some districts it has certainly degenerated into a somewhat disreputable game. But the fact that the intoxication of the girls is tolerated on this occasion among a peasantry whose men even are seldom drunk except on certain religious occasions—on Easter-day and after funerals—proves clearly that the custom was once, as I think it sometimes is now, a genuinely religious rite and an acknowledged means of divination.
A modification of this custom, preferred in some districts as obviating alike the unpleasant process of eating salt-cake and the disreputable sequel thereto, substitutes for dreaming two other ancient methods of divination—divination by drawing lots, a primitive system common to many peoples but employed nevertheless even by established oracles[800] in ancient Greece, and divination from chance words overheard by the diviner, a method which is, I think, more exclusively Hellenic. For this form of the custom also salt-cakes are required, but only a morsel of each is eaten, and the remainder of the cake is divided into three portions, to which are tied respectively red, black, and blue ribbands. Each girl then places her three pieces under her pillow for the night, and in the morning draws out one by chance. The red ribband denotes a bachelor, the black a widower, and the blue a stranger, that is to say some one other than a fellow-villager. Then, in order to supplement with fuller detail the indications of the lot, the girl takes her stand in the door-way of the cottage and listens to the casual conversation of the neighbours or the passers-by; and the first name, trade, occupation, and suchlike which she hears mentioned are taken to be those of her future husband.
Another similar custom, practised only by girls and not necessarily taken more seriously than a game of forfeits, preserves in its modern name ὁ κλήδονας[801] the old word κληδών, and the purpose of the custom is to obtain that which Homer[802] actually denoted by κληδών, a presage drawn from chance words. The preliminaries of the ceremony are as follows. On the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist[803] a boy (who for choice should be the first-born of parents still living) is sent to fetch fresh water from the spring or well. This water is known as ἀμίλητο νερό, ‘speechless water,’ because the boy who brings it is forbidden to speak to anyone on his way. Each girl then drops into the vessel of water some object such as a coin, a ring, or, most frequently, an apple as her token. The vessel is then closed up and left for the night on the roof of a house or some other open place ‘where the stars may see it.’ The proceedings of the next morning vary. According to one traveller[804], each girl first takes out her own apple—for he mentions only this token—and then draws off some of the water into a smaller vessel. This vessel is then supported by two other girls on the points of their four thumbs and begins to revolve of its own accord. If it turn towards the right, the girl may expect to marry as she wishes; if to the left, otherwise. Also, he says, they wash their hands with this water and then go out into the road, and take the first name they hear spoken as that of their future husband. This latter part of the ceremony is true to the meaning of the word κλήδονας and is a genuine instance of divination from chance words. But neither this nor the former part as described by Magnoncourt is generally practised now. The usual procedure is either for the boy who fetched the water or for the girls in rotation to plunge the hand in and draw out the first object touched, improvising or reciting at the same time some couplet favourable or adverse to the love or matrimonial prospects of her who shall be found to own the forthcoming object; and so in turn, until each girl has received back her token and learnt the presage of her fate.
The recitation of possibly prepared distichs by those who are taking part in the ceremony is certainly a less pure method of divination than the earlier practice described by Magnoncourt. The prediction is deliberately provided, and the element of chance or of divine guidance is confined to the drawing of the token. The older method exhibits more clearly the relation of the modern custom to the superstitious observation of κληδόνες from the time of the Odyssey[805] onwards. Thus when Odysseus heard the suitors threaten to take the beggar Irus to Epirus, ‘even to the tyrant Echetus the destroyer of all men,’ he hailed the chance words as a divine ratification of his hope that soon the suitors should take their own journey to another destroyer of all men, even the tyrant of the nether world, and ‘he rejoiced in the presage’ (χαῖρεν δὲ κλεηδόνι)[806].
The same method of divination was frequently employed in the classical age also, and that too not only privately[807] but even by public oracles. It was thus that Hermes Agoraeus at Pherae made response to his worshippers. The enquirer presented himself towards evening before the statue of the god, burnt incense on the hearth, filled with oil and lighted some bronze lamps that stood there, placed a certain bronze coin of the local currency upon the altar, whispered his question into the ear of the statue, and then at once holding his hands over his ears made his way out of the agora. Once outside, he removed his hands, and the first words which greeted his ears were accepted as the god’s response to his question[808]. A primitive statue of Hermes with the surname κλεηδόνιος existed also at Pitane[809], which place may be the actual site of that ‘sanctuary of chance utterances’ (κληδόνων ἱερόν) to which, according to Pausanias[810], the people of Smyrna resorted for oracles. And at Thebes again Apollo Spodios gave his replies in like manner[811].
Clearly then in antiquity divination from chance words was a well-established religious institution; and at the present day, though the practice is rarer, its character is unchanged. The religious nature of the two customs which I have described is shown by their association with the festivals of St Catharine and St John the Baptist; and though in different localities or periods a certain amount of divination by the lot or other means has been mixed up with divination from chance words, the latter obviously forms the essence of both rites, supplying as it does to the one its very name, and supplementing in the other the meagre indications of the lot with more detailed information. A girl may learn from the colour of the ribband attached to the piece of salt-cake which she happens to draw whether her future husband is bachelor, widower, or stranger; but only from the chance utterance accepted as an answer to her own secret questionings can she learn the name and home and occupation and appearance of her destined husband.
The next branch of divination, the science of reading omens of success or failure in the objects which a traveller meets on his road, is still largely cultivated. In old days indeed it was so elaborate a science that a treatise, as Suidas tells us, could be written on this one method of divination alone. Possibly the same feat might be accomplished at the present day if a complete collection were made of all the superstitions on the subject of ‘meeting’ (ἀπάντημα) in all the villages of Greece. How instructive the results might be, I cannot forecast; but at any rate the task is beyond me, and I must content myself with mentioning a few of the commonest examples. To meet a priest is always unlucky, and for men even more so than for women, for, unless they take due precautions as they pass him[812], their virility is likely to be impaired; and the omen is even worse if the priest happen to be riding a donkey, for even the name of that animal is not mentioned by some of the peasants without an apology[813]. To meet a witch also is unfortunate, and since any old woman may be a witch, it is wise to make the sign of the cross before passing her. A cripple is also ominous of failure in an enterprise. On the other hand to meet an insane person is usually accounted a good omen, for insanity implies close communion with the powers above. To meet a woman with child is also fortunate, for it indicates that the journey undertaken will bear fruit; and the peasant by way of acknowledgement never fails to bow or to bare his head, and if he be exceptionally polite may wish the woman a good confinement. Of animals those which most commonly forebode ill are the hare, the rat, the stoat, the weasel, and any kind of snake. In Aetolia superstition is so strong regarding these that the mere sight of one of them, or indeed of the trail of a snake across the path, is enough to deter many a peasant from his day’s work and to send him back home to sit idly secure from morn till night; and even the more stout-hearted will cross themselves or spit three times before proceeding.
That some of these beliefs date from classical times is certain. Aristophanes, playing upon the use of ὄρνις, ‘a bird,’ in the sense of ‘omen,’ rallies the Athenians upon calling ‘a meeting a bird, a sound a bird, a servant a bird, and an ass a bird[814]’; and there can be little doubt that the ass belonged then as now to the category of objects ominous to encounter on the road; and the same author[815], corroborated in this case by Theophrastus’ portrait of the superstitious man[816], speaks to the dread inspired by a weasel crossing a man’s path. The snake too, it can hardly be doubted, was, owing perhaps to its association with tombs, an object of awe to the superstitious out of doors as well as within the house[817]. On the other hand an insane person apparently was in Theophrastus’ time not as now an omen of good but of evil, to be averted by spitting on the bosom[818]. But though the modern interpretations of such omens may not be identical in every respect with the old, enough has been said to show that the science of divining from the encounters of the road is still flourishing.
The observation of birds is in many cases closely allied with the last method of divination; for naturally the peasant as he goes on his way is as quick to notice the birds as any other object which he encounters. But since auspices may also be taken under other conditions, it will be well to observe the old line of demarcation, and to treat this branch of augury, as it was treated in ancient handbooks[819], separately. Moreover the attitude of the modern folk towards these two branches of divination justifies the division. The superstitions which I have just recorded are somewhat blindly and unintelligently held; but in the taking of auspices proper the ordinances of ancient lore which the people follow are felt by them to be doubly sanctioned—by reason as well as by antiquity; they apprehend the theory on which their practice is based—the idea that birds are better suited than any other animate thing, by virtue both of their rapid flight and of their keen and extended vision, to be the messengers between gods and men.
In practice this branch of divination is still concerned chiefly with the large and predatory birds to which alone was originally applied the term οἰωνός. ‘The largest, the strongest, the most intelligent, and at the same time those whose solitary habits gave them more individual character,’ says a French writer[820], ‘were deliberately preferred by the diviners of antiquity as the subjects of their observation. For these and these only was reserved at first the name οἰωνός, “solitary bird[821],” or bird of presage’; and he goes on to suggest that the Oriental belief in the magical power of blood to revivify the souls of the dead and to stimulate prophecy influenced the selection for a prophetic rôle of carnivorous birds such as might indeed often feed on the entrails of those very victims from which sacrificial omens were taken. But the reasons assigned by Plutarch for the pre-eminence of birds among all other things as the messengers of heaven apply with so special a force to the special class of birds selected, that it seems unnecessary to search out reasons more abstruse.
‘Birds,’ he says[822], ‘by their quickness and intelligence and their alertness in acting upon every thought, are a ready instrument for the use of God, who can prompt their movements, their cries and songs, their pauses or wind-like flights, thus bidding some men check, and others pursue to the end, their course of action or ambitions. It is on this account that Euripides calls birds in general “heralds of gods,” while Socrates speaks of making himself “a fellow-servant with swans.”’
In this special class of ominous birds the principal group, says the same French writer[823], was composed of the eagle (ἀετός), the messenger[824] of Zeus, the ‘most perfect of birds[825]’; the vulture (γύψ), which closely rivalled even the king of birds[826]; the raven (κόραξ), the favourite and companion of Apollo, a bird so much observed that there were specialists (κορακομάντεις) who studied no other species; and the carrion-crow (κορώνη), transferred from the service of Apollo to that of Hera[827] or Athene[828]. These, it may safely be said, were observed at all periods. Of others, various species of hawk (ἵεραξ, ἴρηξ)—in particular that known as κίρκος, acting in Homeric times as the ‘swift messenger of Apollo[829]’ and thus rivalling the raven—and with them the heron[830] (ἐρωδιός) enjoyed in early times great respect, but gradually fell out of favour with the augur. But as these disappeared from the canon of ornithological divination, certain other birds were admitted, the wren[831] (τρόχιλος or βασιλίσκος), the owl (γλαῦξ)[832], the κρέξ dubiously identified with our ‘rail’ (crex rallus, Linn.), and the woodpecker (δρυοκολάπτης).
The continuity of the art of taking auspices is at once obvious when it is found that the birds which the modern peasant most frequently observes are of the very same class which furnished the Homeric gods with their special envoys. Eagles, vultures, hawks, ravens, crows—these are still the chief messengers of heaven, and only one other bird can claim equality with them, that bird which in classical times symbolised wisdom, the owl.
Of the methods pursued by the professional augurs in ancient Greece unfortunately less is known. The best treatise on the subject is that of Michael Psellus[833], written in the eleventh century; but probably ancient works on the subject, such as that of Telegonus to which Suidas[834] refers, were then extant and contributed the bulk of his information. But even so it is the broad principles rather than the detailed application of them which Psellus presents, and on them we must in the main rely in comparing the modern science with the ancient.
First of all the species of bird under observation had to be ascertained; for the characters of different species were held to be so various that birds as closely cognate as the raven and the crow employed wholly contrary methods of communication with mankind. ‘If as we go out of our house to work,’ says Psellus[835], ‘we hear the cry of a raven behind or of a crow in front, it forebodes anxieties and difficulties in our business, while if a crow fly past and caw on the left or a raven do likewise on the other side, it gives hope and confidence.’ The crow then was not subject even to the rule concerning right and left which applied, so far as I know, to all other birds, but, thanks to some innate contrariety, reversed the normal significance of position, and therewith also of cry and of flight[836]. Such exceptions even to the most general rules made the accurate identification of species an indispensable preliminary to successful augury. The same primary condition still holds. The diviner must be able to distinguish the cawing of a crow settled on his roof from that of a jackdaw; the former is an omen of death, as perhaps it was in Hesiod’s day[837], to some member of his family, the latter heralds the coming of a letter from a friend abroad. Again he must be able to distinguish the brown owl (κουκουβάγια) from the tawny owl (χαροποῦλι)[838]; the message of the former may be good or bad, as we shall see, according to its actions, while the latter brings only presages of woe.
The species having been identified, there remained, according to Psellus[839], four possible points in the behaviour of the bird itself (all of them liable to be modified in significance by the position of the observer) to be noticed and interpreted; these were its cry (anciently φωνή or κλαγγή), its flight (πτῆσις), its posture when settled (ἕδρα or καθέδρα), and any movement or action performed by it while thus settled (ἐνέργεια). These divisions are still recognised in modern augury.
The cry is observed in the case of many birds. The scream of an eagle is a warning of fighting or conflict to come. The croak of a raven, especially if it be thrice repeated, while the bird is flying over a house or a village, is a premonition of death to one of the inmates. The laugh of the woodpecker, owing I suppose to its mocking sound, is a sign that an intrigue against some one’s person or pocket is in train. The repeated call of the cuckoo within the bounds of a village forebodes an epidemic therein.
Flight is chiefly observed in the case of the birds of prey. The successful swoop of an eagle upon its prey, or the rapid determined flight of a hawk in pursuit of some other bird, is an encouragement to the observer (provided of course that the birds are seen on his right hand) to pursue untiringly any enterprise in which he is engaged, and is a promise of success and profit therein. In Scyros I once pointed out to my guide a large hawk chasing a flock of pigeons, which he at once hailed as a good omen and watched carefully as long as it was in sight; and when I asked him what kind of hawk it was, he promptly replied that that kind was known as τσίκρος—the goshawk, I believe. This word is a modern form of the ancient κίρκος[840], and a closely similar incident is mentioned in the Odyssey, when this bird, the ‘swift messenger of Apollo,’ is seen by Telemachus on the right, tearing a pigeon in its talons and scattering its feathers to the ground, and is taken to foreshow the fate that awaits Eurymachus[841].
The position occupied and the posture are observed above all in the case of owls. The ‘brown owl’ (κουκουβάγια), perched upon the roof of a house and suggesting by its inert posture that it is waiting in true oriental fashion for an event expected within a few days, forebodes a death in the household; but if it settle there for a few moments only, alert and vigilant, and then fly off elsewhere, it betokens merely the advent and sojourn there of some acquaintance. Another species of owl, our ‘tawny owl’ I believe, known popularly as χαροποῦλι or ‘Charon’s bird[842],’ is, as the name suggests, a messenger of evil under all circumstances, whether it be heard hooting or be seen sitting in deathlike stillness or flitting past like a ghost in the gathering darkness.
The casual actions and movements of birds are less observed now than the cry, flight, and posture; nor am I aware of any auspices being drawn therefrom with regard to any matters of higher importance and interest than the prospective state of the weather. For such humdrum prognostication poultry[843] serve better than the more dignified birds—perhaps because their movements on the ground are more easily observed—and by pluming themselves, by scratching a hole in which to dust themselves over, and by roosting on one leg or with their heads turned in some particular direction foretell rain, fine weather, or a change of wind.
All these auspices are further modified, as in ancient times, by the position of the observer in reference to the bird observed. The right hand side is the region of good omen, whether the bird be seen or heard; and if it be a case of the bird crossing the path of the observer, passage from left to right is to be desired, on the principle that all is well that ends well; flight from right to left indicates a decline of good fortune. Motion towards the right, it may be noted, has always been the auspicious direction in Greece. In that direction, according to Homer, the herald carried round the lot which had been shaken from the helmet, to be claimed by that Chieftain whose token it might prove to be[844]; in that direction Odysseus in beggar-guise proceeded round the board, asking alms of the suitors[845]; in that direction even the gods passed their wine[846]. And in like manner at the present day wine is passed, cards are played, and at weddings bride and bridegroom are led round the altar, from left to right. Thus then in modern augury too, if the eagle’s scream, which forebodes fighting, be heard on the right, the hearer will come well out of it, but if on the left, he is like to be worsted. If the woodpecker laugh on the right, the hearer may proceed with full confidence to cheat his neighbour, but if the sound come from the left, he must be wary to baffle intrigues against himself. If the hawk pursue its prey on the right or across a man’s path from left to right, he may take the pursuer as the type of himself and go about the work in hand with assurance of success; but if the omen be on the other side or in the other direction, some enemy is the hawk and he himself is the pigeon to be plucked.
The interpretation of auspices is also affected by number. A single or twice repeated cry of a bird may be of good omen, but, if the same note be heard three times, the meaning may be reversed. This applies in Cephallenia, as I was told, to the case already mentioned of a raven flying over a house; one or two croaks are a presage of security or plenty, but three are a warning of imminent death. In this detail a pronounced change of feeling towards the number three is responsible for what must, I think, be a contravention of the ancient rules in the case. According to Michael Psellus, an even number of cries from the crow were lucky and an odd number unlucky; but the crow, as we have seen, was perverse and abnormal; reversing therefore the rule in the case of other birds, we find that an odd number of croaks from a raven should be lucky. But the number three, which in old times was lucky, is now universally unlucky; the peasant often will apologize for having to mention the number; and Tuesday, being called Τρίτη, the ‘third day’ of the week, is the unlucky day. But if in this case the significance of a particular number has changed, the principle of taking number into consideration is indubitably ancient.
Moreover there are some cases in which even the particular application of the old principle holds good. The first, almost the only, literary poet of modern Greece (as distinguished from the many composers of unwritten ballads), who found beauty in the popular beliefs and music in the vulgar tongue, makes his heroine thus divine her own death:
Καὶ τὰ πουλάκι’ ἀποῦ ’ρθασιν συντροφιασμέν’ ὁμάδη
σημάδ’ εἶν’ πῶς ὀγλήγορα πανδρεύομαι ’στὸν Ἅιδη·
λογιάζω κι’ ὁ ’Ρωτόκριτος ἀπόθανε ’στὰ ξένα
κ’ ἦρθ’ ἡ ψυχή του νά μ’ εὑρῇ νὰ σμίξῃ μετ’ ἐμένα[847].
“And the little birds that have come consorting close together are a sign that soon I am to be wed in Hades. I see that Erotocritus has died in a strange land, and his soul has come to seek me, to mingle with me.”
Here neither the species of the birds nor their cry nor flight is taken into account; the whole significance of the omen turns on the close company which they kept. And for the method of interpreting it we can go back to Aristotle. ‘Seers observe whether birds settle apart or settle together; the former indicates enmity, the latter mutual peace[848].’
Lastly, as regards practical augury from birds at the present day it may be laid down as a rule that any extraordinary phenomenon, exciting in the simple peasant’s mind more alarm than curiosity, passes for a bad omen. The hen that so far forgets her sex as to crow like a cock falls under suspicion and the knife at once. To the professional diviner of old time probably such incidents were less distressing; he could observe such striking anomalies in as calmly judicial a spirit as the details of more ordinary occurrences. But at the present day, though there are magicians in plenty, there are no specialists, to my knowledge, in the science of auspices. The modern peasant does not entice the birds with food to a special spot, as did Teiresias[849], in order to listen to their talk and to gain from them deliberately the knowledge of things that are and things that shall be. But amateur though he be, lacking in power of minute observation and in science of detailed interpretation, such rudiments of the art as he possesses are an heritage from the old Hellenic masters of divination.
So far then as the broad principles of practical auspice-taking are concerned, the proofs of the identity of modern with ancient methods are sufficiently complete; and it remains only to show that the modern practice of this art is not a mere inert survival of customs no longer understood but is in truth informed by the same intelligent religious spirit as in antiquity. What that spirit was, is admirably defined in that passage of Plutarch which I have already quoted, in which he claims that the quickness of birds and their intelligence and their alertness to act upon every thought qualify them, beyond all other living things, for the part of messengers between gods and men. Celsus too in his polemics against Christianity, made frank confession of the old faith: ‘We believe in the prescience of all animals and particularly of birds. Diviners are only interpreters of their predictions. If then the birds ... impart to us by signs all that God has revealed to them, it follows of necessity that they have a closer intimacy than we with the divine, that they surpass us in knowledge of it, and are dearer to God than we[850].’ Indeed it might seem that there was hope of birds knowing that which a god sought in vain to learn. To Demeter enquiring for her ravished child ‘no god nor mortal man would tell the true tale, nor came there to her any bird of omen as messenger of truth[851].’ In effect, the special aptitude of birds to carry divine messages to men was never questioned in ancient Greece; it was a very axiom of religion, without which the whole science of auspices would have been a baseless fabrication.
Now it would have been no matter of surprise for us, if practical augury had still been in vogue at the present day and the theory had been forgotten; if the customs born of a belief in the prophetic power of birds had, with the inveteracy of all custom, outlived the parent principle. Rather it is surprising that among all the perplexity and bewilderment of thought caused by the long series of changes, religious, political, and social, through which Greece has passed, this recognition of birds as intermediaries between heaven and earth has abated none of its force or its purity, neither vanquished by the direct antagonism of Christianity, nor contaminated by the influx of Slavonic or other foreign thought. Yet so it is; and the perusal of any collection of modern folk-songs will show that the idea is fully as familiar now as in the literature of old time.
A few examples may be cited; and in selecting them I shall exclude from consideration those many Klephtic ballads which open with a conversation between three ‘birds[852]’; for the word ‘bird’ (πουλί) seems to have become among the Klephts a colloquial equivalent for ‘spy’ or ‘scout,’ suggested perhaps by the qualities of intelligence, alertness, and speed required, and it is admittedly[853] impossible in many cases to determine whether the term has its literal or its conventional meaning. Moreover these openings of ballads have passed into a somewhat set form; and formulae are no more proof of the continuance of belief than mummies of the continuance of life.
But, even with the range of trustworthy evidence thus limited, the residue of popular poetry contains ample store of passages in which birds are recognised as the best messengers between this world and another. And here, as we shall see, the reiteration of the idea is not uniform in expression; the thought has not been crystallised into a number of beautiful but inert phrases; it is still alive, still young, still procreative of fresh poetry.
There is a well-known folk-song, recorded in several versions, which tells how a young bride, trusting in the might of her nine brothers and in her husband’s valour, boasted that she had no fear of Charos. ‘A bird, an evil bird, went unto Charos, and told him, and Charos shot an arrow at her and the girl grew pale; a second and a third he shot and stretched her on her death-bed[854].’ The special bird in the poet’s mind was, one may surmise, ‘Charon’s bird,’ the tawny owl, which as I have noted is always a messenger of evil. In another poem a bird issues from the lower world and brings doleful tidings to women who weep over their lost ones. ‘A little bird came forth from the world below; his claws were red and his feathers black, reddened with blood and blackened with the soil. Mothers run to see him, and sisters to learn of him, and wives of good men to get true tidings. Mother brings sugar, and sister scented wine, and wives of good men bear amaranth in their hands. “Eat the sugar, bird, and drink of the scented wine, and smell the amaranth, and confess to us the truth.” “Good women, that which I saw, how should I tell it or confess it? I saw Charos riding in the plains apace; he dragged the young men by the hair, the old men by their hands, and ranged at his saddle-bow he bore the little children[855].”’
Nor is it only between earth and the nether world that birds carry tidings to and fro; earth and heaven are equally united by their ministry. An historical ballad, belonging to the year 1825, when Ibrahim Pasha had just occupied the fortress of Navarino and other places in the Morea and was about to join in investing Mesolonghi, gives to this idea unusually imaginative treatment; for the bird which brings from heaven encouragement and prophecies of future success (one of which was literally fulfilled in the battle of Navarino two years later) is an incarnation of the soul of a fallen Greek warrior. ‘“Would I were a bird” (I said), “that I might fly and go to Mesolonghi, and see how goes the sword-play and the musketry, how fight the unconquered falcons[856] of Roumelie.” And a bird of golden plumage warbled answer to me: “Hold, good George; an thou thirstest for Arab[857] blood, here too are infidels for thee to slay as many as thou wilt. Dost see far away yonder the Turkish ships? Charos is standing over them, and they shall be turned to ashes.” “Good bird, how didst thou learn this that thou tellest me?” “A bird I seem to thee to be, but no bird am I. Yon island that I espied for thee afar belongeth to Navarino; ’twas there I spent my last breath a-fighting. Tsamados am I, and unto the world have I come; from the heavens where I dwell I discern you clearly, yet yearn to see you face to face.” “Nay, what shouldest thou see now among us in our unhappy land? Knowest thou not what befell and now is in the Morea?” “Good George, be not distraught, consent not to despair; though the Morea fight not now, a time will come again when they will fight like wild beasts and chase their foe. Piteously shall bones lie scattered before Mesolonghi, and there shall the lions of Suli rejoice.” And the bird flew away and went up to the heavens[858].’
Such an identification of the winged messenger with the soul of a dead man does not represent the ordinary thought of the people; it is a conceit peculiar to this ballad; but the very fact that the dead warrior is made to assume the guise of a bird in order to communicate with his living comrades shows how strong is the popular feeling that birds are the natural intermediaries between earth and heaven.
Thus then the ancient belief that birds are among the most apt instruments of divine and human communion has survived as little impaired by lapse of ages as the practical science of augury founded upon it. Perhaps indeed it has even fared better; for practical augury has, I suspect, suffered from the paucity or extinction of professional augurs, who alone could be expected to remember and to transmit to their successors all the complex details of their art, whereas the old faith may even have gained thereby; for history, I suppose, is not void of instances in which the professional exponents of a religion have fostered its forms and have starved its spirit, forgetting their ministry in their desire for mastery, and making their office the sole gate of communion with heaven. But, be that as it may, such decline as there may have been from the complete and elaborate system of auspices which the ancients possessed is not at any rate due to any abatement of the ancient belief in the mediation of birds.
Not of course that the peasant, when he draws an omen from the eagle’s stoop or the raven’s croak, pauses at all to reflect on the general principle by which his act is guided; his recognition of the principle is then as formal and unconscious as is his avowal of Christianity when he crosses himself. But if ever in meditative mood he seeks the reason and basis of his auspice-taking, he falls back, as the popular poetry proves, on the doctrine that the powers above and below have chosen birds as their messengers to mankind.
Doubtless many other peoples have held or still hold kindred beliefs; but the fact that in Modern Greece the same class of birds is observed as in Ancient Greece and that the same broad principles of interpretation are followed is sufficient warranty that the underlying belief is also a genuinely Hellenic heritage.
The next method of divination to be considered, that namely in which omens were obtained from sacrifice, was anciently divided into two branches; in one the diviner concerned himself with the dissection of the victim, and based his predictions on the appearance of various internal parts; in the other, special portions of the victim were consumed by fire, and omens were read in the flame or smoke therefrom. Of the latter I have discovered no trace in Modern Greece; but the former still survives in some districts.
Naturally however this mode of divination is less frequently practised than that with which I have just dealt. The cry or the flight of birds can be observed without let or hindrance in the course of daily work, and, what is more important still, without cost; while this method involves the slaying of a victim, and is consequently confined to high days and holidays when the peasants eat meat. But when occasion offers or even demands the performance of the rite, the presages drawn therefrom are the more valued because they are less readily to be obtained.
And the value attached to them is by no means diminished because the method pursued is less intelligent than the taking of auspices. In the latter case, as we have seen, the common-folk have a reasonable basis for their actions in the universal belief that birds are by nature qualified to act as messengers between gods and men; in the former the peasants are more blindly and mechanically repeating the practices of their forefathers. They would be hard put to it to say how it comes to pass that divine counsels should be found figured in the recesses of a sheep’s anatomy. But in their very inability to answer this question, no less than in their acceptance of the means of communion, they resemble their ancestors; for, with all their love of enquiry, they too practised the art without answering conclusively or unanimously the questionings of their own hearts concerning it. One theory advanced was that the anatomical construction of the victim was directly affected by the prayers and religious rites to which it was subjected. Another held the internal symptoms to be inexorable and immutable, and saw divine agency only in the promptings of the sacrificer’s mind and his choice of an animal whose entrails were suitably inscribed by nature[859]. A third view, advocated by Plato, was that the liver was as a mirror in which divine thought was reflected; during life this divine thought might remain hidden as tacit intuition or be manifested in prophetic utterance; after death the divine visions contemplated by the soul were left recorded in imagery upon the liver, and faded only by degrees[860]. The obvious objection to this theory was its too practical corollary, that human entrails would be the most interesting to consult. Less barbarous therefore in consequences, if also less exquisite in idea, was the fourth doctrine, propounded by Philostratus, that the liver had no power of presage unless it were completely emancipated from the passions and surrendered wholly to divine influence—a condition best fulfilled by animals of peaceful and apathetic temperament[861].
But while these theories were built up and knocked down, the practices which they were meant to explain continued firm and unshaken. The fact seems to be that the custom of consulting entrails was not native to Greece. In Homeric times the liver was not dissected in search of omens, and such observations as were made were directed to the brightness of the flame and the ascent of the smoke from burnt offerings and not to any malformation or discoloration of the victim’s inward parts. All that could be learnt was whether the sacrifice, and therefore also the prayers accompanying it, were accepted or rejected. The complexities of post-Homeric divination from burnt sacrifice and the whole system of inspecting the entrails seem to have been a foreign importation. Whether the source was Etruscan, Carian, Cyprian, Babylonian, or Egyptian, does not here concern us[862]; the practices were in origin foreign to Greece, and the ancients, in referring the invention of them to Delphus, son of Poseidon, to Prometheus, to Sisyphus, or to Orpheus[863], were guilty not only of sheer fabrication but of manifest anachronism[864]. Homer convicts them.
It is then the foreign origin of these methods of divination which explains the attitude of the ancient Greeks towards them. It was a practice, not a theory—a custom, not an idea—a conglomeration of usages, not a coherent and reasoned system—which was introduced from abroad. The Greeks accepted it readily as furnishing them with one more means to that communion with their gods which to them was a spiritual necessity. The principle of the machinery employed was unknown to them; but what matter? Its operation was commended by the experience of others and soon tested by their own. The unknown principle long continued to excite interest, conjecture, speculation, among the educated and enlightened, but their failures to reach any final and unanimous conclusion never moved them to dispute the tested fact. And if this was the attitude of the educated, the common-folk of those days must surely have been in the same position as the people of to-day—gladly accepting the usage and avowedly ignorant of the principle. Such blind acquiescence during so many centuries may seem indeed a disparagement of the Greeks’ intelligence; but it is equally a testimonial to their religious faith; it is the things which defy reasoning that are best worth believing; and among these the Greeks have steadfastly numbered the writing of divine counsels on the sacrificial victim’s inward parts.
The actual methods now pursued are also an inheritance from the ancient world. The animal from which the Klephts a century ago are said to have taken omens most successfully was the sheep, and the portion of its anatomy on which the tokens of the future were to be read was the shoulder-blade. The questions to which an answer was most often sought were, as might be surmised from the life of the enquirers, questions of war. ‘In this connexion,’ says a Greek writer[865] of the first half of last century, when stories of the Klephts’ life might still be heard from their own lips, ‘the shoulder-blade of a young lamb is ... a veritable Sibylline book; for its condition enables men to ascertain beforehand the issue of an important engagement, the serious losses on each side, the strength of the enemy, the reinforcements to be expected, and indeed the very moment when danger threatens’; and he recounts, by way of illustration, the story of a Thessalian band of Klephts, whose captain, in the security of his own fastness, was sitting divining in this way; suddenly he sprang up with the exclamation, ‘The Turks have caught us alive,’ and at the head of his troop had only just time to break through the Turkish forces which were already surrounding them.
That this method of divination was derived directly and with little deviation from the old system of inspecting shoulder-blades (ὠμοπλατοσκοπία) as known to Michael Psellus can hardly be doubted. ‘If the question be of war,’ he says, ‘a patch of red observed on the right side of the shoulder-blade, or a long dark line on the left, foreshows a great war; but if both sides present their normal white appearance, it is an omen of peace to come[866].’
But the days of patriot-outlaws are over now, and the questions submitted to the arbitrament of ovine shoulder-blades are of more peaceful bent. It is the shepherd now, and not the warrior, who thus resolves the uncertainties of the future. It is the vicissitudes of weather, not of war, that interest him; the birth of lambs, not the death of Turks. It is of plague, pestilence, and famine threatening his flock, not of battle and murder and sudden death for himself, that he seeks forewarning. But the same instrument of divination supplies the answers.
My own knowledge of its use is obtained entirely from Acarnania and Aetolia; but the practice is also recorded from Zagorion in Epirus[867], and prevails too, I have been told, among the shepherds of Elis. The opportunity for it is, as I have said, offered only by certain feast-days, when the peasants indulge in meat. On other occasions, when the shepherds kill only in order to sell in the towns, divination cannot be undertaken; for it is only after cooking that the meat can be properly removed from the bone so as to leave it clean and legible. There is therefore no doubt an economical reason for confining this practice to certain religious festivals; but this consideration must not be allowed to obscure the genuinely religious character of the rite itself. In Zagorion, at the festivals in honour of the patron-saint of each village or monastery, sheep are brought and slain in the enclosure of the particular sanctuary, and are called κουρμπάνι̯α[868], a plural evidently of the Hebrew word ‘corban,’ a thing devoted to the service of God; thus both name and ceremony proclaim this custom a genuine survival of sacrifice; and it is apparently from the shoulder-blades of these victims that omens are drawn[869]. A similar case of divination by sacrifice came to my knowledge in Boeotia, though whether the shoulder-blade or some other part of the victim furnished the predictions, I could not ascertain. While looking round a small museum at Skimitári I had happened to stop before a relief representing a man leading some animal to sacrifice, and heard the custodian, a peasant of the place, remark to another peasant, evidently a stranger to the district, who had followed me in, ‘That is just like what we do’; and he then explained that at a church of St George, somewhere in the neighbourhood, there was an annual festival at which a similar scene took place. The villagers of the country-side congregate early on the morning of St George’s day round the church, each man bringing a kid or a lamb; service in the church having been duly performed, the priest comes out and blesses each of the animals in turn, after which they are killed and roasted and a feast is held accompanied by some kind of divination from the victims. Such in brief was the custodian’s account; but, when I intervened in the conversation with a question about the method of divining, he would say nothing more. The Boeotians are still boorish. But what I had already overheard exhibits clearly enough the religious character of the rite; and I do not doubt that in Aetolia and Acarnania also the peasants handle the sheep’s shoulder-blade in an equally religious mood. Their very indulgence in meat is due to the religious occasion; much more therefore the divination which reveals to them the mind of those powers whom they worship.
In the art of interpreting the particular marks upon the shoulder-blade I cannot claim to be an adept. The few facts which I managed to discover were that in general spots and blurs upon the bone are prognostications adverse to the hopes of the enquirer, and that a clean white surface always gives full security: that different portions of the bone are scrutinised for answers to different classes of questions; thus the prospects of the lambing season are indicated on the projecting ridge of the bone, and the weather-forecast on the flat surfaces on either side of it, marks on the right side (the bone being held horizontally with what is naturally its upper end towards the diviner) being favourable signs, and those on the left ill-omened: and finally that a pestilence is foreshown by a depression in the surface of the bone. The science, I was told, is extremely complex and elaborate; but I never had the fortune to meet any peasant who was considered an expert in it; the best exponents of it are to be found among the mountain shepherds, and since these are constantly shifting their grazing grounds it is no easy matter to fall in with one both able and willing to unfold the full mysteries of the art. How to distinguish in interpretation markings of different sizes, shapes, and colours I never discovered[870].
But the little which I learnt agrees in the main with the ancient method as described by Michael Psellus[871]. ‘Those,’ he says, ‘who wish to avail themselves of this means of divination, pick out a sheep or lamb from the flock, and, after settling in their mind or saying aloud the question which they wish to ask, slay the victim and remove the shoulder-blade from the carcase. This—the organ of divination as they think—they bake thoroughly upon hot embers, and having stripped it of the flesh find on it the tokens of that issue about which they are enquiring. The answers to different kinds of questions are learnt from different parts[872]. Questions of life or death are decided by the projection of the ridge[873]; if this is clean and white on both sides, a promise of life is thereby given; but if it is blurred, it is a token of death. Weather-forecasts again are made from inspection of the middle part of the shoulder-blade; if the two membrane-like surfaces which form the middle of the shoulder-blade on either side of the ridge[874] are white and clean, they indicate calm weather to come; while, if they are thickly spotted, the reverse is to be expected.’ Here, it will have been noticed, no mention is made of any discrimination between the markings on the right and on the left sides of the bone; but this, I suspect, is an omission on the part of Psellus, for so simple a principle of ancient divination is hardly likely to have been excluded from consideration in this case. In other respects the information which I obtained tallies closely with his account; the clean and white appearance of the bone was then, as it is now, a reassuring omen; then, as now, the prospects of the weather were to be learnt from the flat surface on either side of the ridge; then, as now, the question of life or death, which from the shepherd’s point of view becomes most acute at each lambing season, was settled by reference to the ridge of the bone. To judge then from the few principles of the art known to me, divination from the shoulder-blade, besides being still recognised as a religious rite, is conducted on the same lines by Aetolian and Acarnanian peasants as it was by those ancient augurs to whose hand-books probably Psellus was indebted for his knowledge.
Another animal utilised in the same district for purposes of divination is the pig; but in this case the prophetic organ is not the shoulder-blade but the spleen. This is removed from the fresh carcase before the rest of the flesh is cut up or cooked in any way, and omens are taken from the roughness or discoloration of its surface. The questions which may be decided by this means are very various—the prospects of weather, of crops, and of vineyards, the success of journeys and other enterprises, the advisability of a contemplated marriage, and so forth. Of the exact details of the art I know even less than in the last case; the facts which I learned were these, that a smooth surface is a good omen, just as it was in the case of other internal organs in the time of Aeschylus[875], while certain roughnesses portend obstacles and difficulties in a journey or enterprise, and further that certain abnormal blotches of colour give warning of blight and mildew on crops and vines. Proficiency in the science, I was told, is commonest among the inhabitants of the low-lying cultivated or wooded districts of Acarnania where large herds of half-wild swine are kept; and hence it is natural that the predictions sought in this way are chiefly concerned with agricultural and social interests, whereas the omens obtained from the sheep’s shoulder-blade by shepherds living solitary lives in the mountains deal with few issues other than the prospects of the flock. But this difference between the two methods of divination is circumstantial rather than essential; either method can, I believe, in the hands of experts be used for answering almost any questions.
Divination from the pig’s spleen is, I think, undoubtedly ancient. It appears to be a solitary survival of the σπλαγχνοσκοπία, or ‘inspection of entrails,’ which in ancient Greece would seem to have been the commonest method of divining from the sacrificial victim. Among the animals embarrassed with prophetic entrails the pig indeed was not ordinarily reckoned; but Pausanias mentions that the people of Cyprus discovered its value[876], and it seems actually to have furnished responses to the highly reputable oracle of Paphos[877]. How it has come to pass that modern Acarnania should preserve a custom peculiar to ancient Cyprus, is a problem that I cannot solve; but it can hardly be questioned that here again we have an old religious rite still maintained as a proven means of communion with those powers in whose knowledge lies the future.
Divination from sacrifice also forms part of the preliminaries of a wedding in many districts. On the day before the actual ceremony[878] the first animal for the feast is killed by the bridegroom with his own hand. The proper victim is a young ram, though in case of poverty a more humble substitute is permitted. This, after being in some districts blessed by the priest who receives in return a portion of the victim, is made to stand facing eastward, and the bridegroom endeavours to slaughter it with a single blow of an axe. Omens for the marriage are taken from the manner and the direction in which the blood spirts out; and a further investigation is sometimes made as to whether the tongue is bitten or the mouth foaming, each sign finding its own interpretation in the lore of the village cronies[879]. The substitute allowed for the ram is a cock. Where the peasants avail themselves of this economy, the killing is usually deferred until after the wedding service, and is performed on the doorstep of the bridegroom’s house before the bride is led in. The bird is held down on the threshold by the best man, and the bridegroom, having been provided with a sharp axe, tries to sever the cock’s neck at one blow. Here too the man’s dexterity counts for something; for the peace or the agony in which the victim is despatched belongs to that class of omens which in antiquity also were drawn from the demeanour of the animal before and during the act of sacrifice, and were taken not indeed to furnish a detailed answer to any question preferred but to indicate the acceptance or the rejection of the offering and the accompanying petitions. It is however the effusion of blood and the muscular convulsions of the decapitated bird which are most keenly observed; for from these signs, I was told, the old women of the village profess to determine such points of interest as the chastity of the bride, the supremacy of the husband or the wife in the future ménage, and the number and sex of children to be born. All this information can in most places where the rite prevails be obtained without any dissection of the victim such as would have been customary in antiquity; but in Aetolia and Acarnania the peasants continue faithful to what are probably ancient methods even in this detail; there the breast-bone of the fowl is treated both at weddings and on other religious occasions as a poor man’s legitimate substitute for the ovine shoulder-blade, which it sufficiently resembles in the possession of a ridge with flat surfaces on either side suitable for divine inscriptions.
But it is not upon coincidences of practical detail, instructive as they are in proving the unity of modern with ancient Greece, that I wish most to insist. If it is clear that the victims often blest by the priests at weddings and on other religious occasions are really felt by the people to be sacrifices, then the practice of divining from them, whatever the exact method pursued, is once more distinct evidence of the belief that the powers above are able and willing to hold close communion with men.
Among the minor methods of divination we may notice first what Suidas calls οἰκοσκοπικόν or ‘domestic divination’; under this head he includes such incidents as the appearance of a weasel on the roof, or of a snake, the spilling of oil, honey, wine, water, or ashes, and the crackling of logs on the fire. The subject was expounded apparently in a serious treatise by one Xenocrates; but it is difficult to suppose that there was any scientific system governing so heterogeneous a conglomeration of incidents; the treatise was probably no more than a compilation of possible occurrences with disconnected regulations for interpreting each of them.
Many events of a like trivial nature are observed at the present day, and the interpretations set upon some of them are demonstrably ancient. A weasel seen about the house, just as on the road, is significant of evil[880], more especially if there is in the household a girl about to be married; for the weasel (νυφίτσα) was once, it is said, a maiden destined to become, as the name implies, a ‘little bride,’ but in some way she was robbed of her happiness and transformed into an animal; its appearance therefore augurs ill for an intended wedding. A snake on the contrary is of good omen when seen in the house; for it is the guardian-genius watching over its own. The orientation of a cat when engaged in washing its face indicates the point of the compass from which wind may be expected. A mouse nibbling a hole in a bag of flour is in Zagorion[881] as distressing a portent as it was to the superstitious man of Theophrastus[882]. A dog howling at night in or near the house portends a death in the neighbourhood, as it did in the time of Theocritus: ‘Hark,’ cries Simaetha, ‘the dogs are barking through the town. Hecate is at the cross-ways. Haste, clash the brazen cymbals[883]’; only instead of the cymbals it is customary to use an ejaculation addressed to the dog, ‘may you burst’ (νὰ σκάσῃς), or ‘may you eat your own head’ (νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου).
Again, to take another class of the domestic incidents mentioned by Suidas, the spilling of oil is universally an evil omen, and the spilling of wine a good omen; the former foreshadows poverty, the latter plenty. The upsetting of water is also a presage of good success, especially on a journey; but in this connexion, as a later chapter will show, it often passes out of the sphere of divination, which should rest on purely fortuitous occurrences, into that of sympathetic magic.
The crackling of logs on the fire, which Suidas mentions, remains to-day also an incident to be duly noted. Generally it appears to mean that good news is coming or that a friend is arriving, but, if sparks and ashes are thrown out into the room, troubles and anxieties must be expected. The spluttering of a lamp or candle also usually foretells misfortune[884]. Omens as to marriage also may be obtained on the domestic hearth. Two leaves of basil are put together upon a live coal; if they lie as they are placed and burn away quietly, the marriage will be harmonious; if there is a certain amount of crackling, the married life of the two persons represented by the leaves will be disturbed by quarrels; if the leaves crackle fiercely and leap apart, there is an incompatibility of temper which renders the projected alliance undesirable.
These are but a few instances of domestic divination, and a much longer list might easily be compiled. But while I know that many of the peasants do indeed observe such occurrences seriously enough to act upon the supernatural warnings thereby conveyed, yet the religious character of these methods of divination is less demonstrable than that of divination from birds or from sacrifice; and I may content myself with indicating, by a few illustrations only, the continuity of Greek superstition in both this and those other minor branches of divination to which I now pass.
Palmistry, according to Suidas, was an ancient art, and a hand-book of it was composed by one Helenos. The signs of the future were read in the lines of the palm and of the fingers as in modern palmistry. This science is still kept up by some of the old women in Greece, but real proficiency therein is as in other countries chiefly attained by the gypsies (ἀτσίγγανοι), who follow a nomadic life in the mountains and have very little intercourse with the native population.
Divination from involuntary movements of various parts of the body—παλμικόν, as Suidas calls it, on which one Poseidonios was a leading authority—is still very generally practised, and evidently has deviated hardly at all from ancient lines. The twitching of a man’s eye or eyebrow is a sign that he will soon see some acquaintance—an enemy, if it be the left eye that throbs, a friend, if it be the right; and this clearly was the principle which the goat-herd of Theocritus followed when he exclaimed, ‘My eye throbs, my right eye; oh! shall I see Amaryllis herself?’[885] Similarly the buzzing or singing of a man’s ears is an indication that he is being spoken of by others, just as it was in the time of Lucian[886]; and, according to the usual principle, the right ear is affected in this manner by praise and kindly speech, the left by backbiting and slander. Again, if the palm of the right hand itch, it shows that a man will receive money; and reversely, if the left palm itch, he will have to pay money away[887]. So too, if the sole of the right or of the left foot itch, it is a premonition of a journey successful or unsuccessful. Omens of this kind fall with uncomfortable frequency to the lot of those who have to find a night’s lodging in Greek inns or cottages.
To the same category belong hiccoughing and sneezing. The hiccough (λόξυγγας), as also in Macedonia choking over food or drink[888], is a sign that some backbiter is at work, and the method of curing it is to guess his name. Sneezing is a favourable omen, but the particular interpretation of it depends on alternative sets of circumstances. If anyone who is speaking is interrupted by a sneeze, whether his own or that of another person present, whatever he is saying is held to be proved true by the occurrence. ’Γειά σου, cry the listeners, καὶ ἀλήθεια λές (or λέει), ‘Health to you, and you speak (or he speaks) truth.’ If however no one present is in the act of speaking when the sneeze is heard, the first phrase only is used, ‘Health to you,’ or by way of facetious variant, νὰ ψοφήσῃ ἡ πεθερά σου, ‘May your mother-in-law die like a dog[889].’ In either case the prayer for good health can benefit only the sneezer; but in the former, that member of the company who is speaking at the time may obtain corroboration of the statement which he is making from the omen produced by another. This part of the belief is very strongly held; and anyone who is in the unfortunate position of having his word doubted or of being compelled to prevaricate will be better advised to conjure up a sneeze than to expostulate or to swear.
Both these interpretations of sneezing date from ancient times. The old equivalent of ‘Health to you’ was Ζεῦ σῶσον, ‘Preserve him, Zeus’; but such expressions are common to many nations and not distinctively Hellenic. The other interpretation of sneezing, as a confirmation of words which are being uttered, is of more special interest, and has been handed down from the Homeric age. ‘Let but Odysseus come,’ says Penelope, ‘and reach his native land, and soon will he and his son requite the violent deeds of these men.’ ‘Thus she spake,’ continues the passage, ‘and Telemachos sneezed aloud; and round about the house rang fearfully; and Penelope laughed, and quickly then she spake winged words to Eumaeus: “Go now, call the stranger here before me. Dost thou not see how my son did sneeze in sanction of all my words[890]? For this should utter death come upon the suitors one and all, nor should one of them escape death and destruction[891].”’
Among other instruments of divination occasionally used are eggs, molten lead, and sieves. Eggs are chiefly used to decide the prospects of a marriage. ‘Speechless water’[892] is fetched by a boy, and the old woman who presides over such operations pours into it the white of an egg. If this keeps together in a close mass, the marriage will turn out well; but if it assumes a broken or confused shape, troubles loom ahead. In antiquity the science was probably more extended; for a work on egg-divining (ὠοσκοπικά) was attributed to Orpheus. A similar rite may be performed with molten lead instead of white of egg, and it suffices to pour it upon any flat surface[893]. Divination with a sieve—the ancient κοσκινομαντεία—also continues, I have been told, but I know no details of the practice.
Thus then the chief methods of learning the gods’ will as practised in antiquity have been reviewed, and are found to be perpetuated in substantially the same form down to the present day; and not only is the form the same but in many of them the same religious spirit is manifest. The principal difference lies in the paucity of professional diviners now; experts assuredly in some branches there still are, but augury alone would now, I think, be a precarious source of livelihood. Advice from the village priest would in so many cases be cheaper and no less valued than that of the soothsayer.
And as with persons so with places. The pagan temples in which oracles were given have been largely superseded by Christian churches, and possibly the peasants are more inclined to pay for masses which will secure the fulfilment of their wishes than for oracular responses which may run counter to them. Still even so oracles have not yet entirely ceased; and in discussing those which survive we shall find once more a coincidence both in form and spirit between ancient and modern Greek religion.
An oracle, it must be remembered, is simply a place set apart for the practice of divination; the method of obtaining responses has always varied in different places, and the mediation of a professional diviner, though usual, cannot be regarded as essential[894]. Those caves therefore where women make offerings of honey-cakes to the Fates[895] and pray for the fulfilment of their conjugal hopes are really oracles, provided that there is some means of learning there whether the prayer is accepted or rejected. And this is often the case; most commonly the answer is inferred—on what principle of interpretation, I do not know—from the dripping of water or the detachment and fall from the roof of a particle of stone; and in Aetolia I was told of a cave in the neighbourhood of Agrinion in which the nature of the response is determined by the behaviour of the bats which frequent it. If they remain hanging quiescent from the roof and walls, the suppliant’s hopes will be realised; but if they be disturbed by his or, more often, her intrusion and flutter round confusedly, the Fates are inexorably adverse.
But besides these modest and unpretentious oracles there still survives in the island of Amorgos an oracle of a higher order ensconced in a church and served by a priest. The saint under whose patronage this pagan institution has continued to flourish is St George, here surnamed Balsamites[896]. To the right on entering the church is seen a large squared block of marble hollowed out so as to have the form of an urn inside, and highly polished. It stands apparently on the natural rock, and is roofed over with a dome-shaped lid capable of being locked. At the present day the mouth of the urn is also covered by a marble slab with a hole pierced through it and fitted with a plug; but this was not observed by travellers of the seventeenth century and is probably a recent addition. There is also a discrepancy in the various accounts of the working of the oracle, the older authorities stating that the answers were given by the rise and fall of the water in the vessel, while the modern custom is to interpret the signs given by particles of dust, insects, hairs, bits of dry leaf, and suchlike floating in a cupful of water drawn from the urn[897].
The description given by a Jesuit priest of Santorini, Robert Sauger by name, of what he himself witnessed in Amorgos towards the end of the seventeenth century may be taken as trustworthy, inasmuch as he elsewhere shows himself an accurate observer and certainly was not tempted in the present case to exaggerate the wonders of the rival Church.
‘The cavity,’ he says, ‘fills itself with water and empties itself of its own accord, and it is impossible to imagine what gives the water this motion and where it has a passage; for, besides being very thick, the marble is so highly polished inside and its continuity of surface is so unbroken that it is impossible to detect the tiniest hole or the least unevenness, saving always the opening at the top which is always kept locked. Additionally astonishing is the fact that within the space of one hour the urn fills and empties itself visibly several times; at one moment you see it so full that the water overflows, and a moment afterwards it becomes so dry that it appears to have had no water in it at all.
‘Superstition is rife everywhere. Any Greeks who have a voyage to make do not fail to come and consult the Urn. If the water is high in it, they set off gaily, promising themselves a good passage. But if the Urn is without water, or the water is low in it, they draw therefrom a bad omen for the success of their journey, and do not go, or, if business makes it imperative, go unwillingly.
‘This alleged miracle, which is so famed throughout all Greece, is a source of much gain to the priest who has charge of the Church of St George; for the concourse of Greeks there is incessant; people come thither from great distances, some in all seriousness to advise themselves of the future, others to see the thing with their own eyes, and a certain number to amuse themselves and to have a laugh, as I have had several times, at the credulity of these folk[898].’
Whatever may have been the original method of oracular response—and I suspect that, while the presence or the absence of water furnished a plain ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to the enquirer, a more detailed reply always depended upon the observation and interpretation of any foreign particles floating in the urn—the faith of the people in its virtue is still intense. It can indeed no longer claim a reputation throughout all Greece; but the inhabitants of Amorgos and the maritime population of neighbouring islands still consult it regularly and seriously concerning voyages, business matters, marriage, and other cares and interests; nor are questioners from farther afield altogether unknown.
This oracular property of water was well known in antiquity. In this branch of divination, says Bouché Leclercq, use was made ‘of springs and streams which were felt to be endowed with a kind of supernatural discernment. Certain waters were accorded the property of confirming oaths and exposing perjury. The water of the Styx, by which the Olympian gods swore, is the prototype of these means of test, among which may be mentioned the spring of Zeus Orkios, near Tyane, and the water-oracle of the Sicilian Palici[899].’ So too water-deities such as Nereus and Proteus were believed to exercise special prophetic powers; and Ino possessed in the neighbourhood of Epidaurus Limera a pool into which barley-cakes were thrown by those who would consult her; if these offerings sank, she was held to have accepted them and to favour the enquirer; if they floated, his hopes would be disappointed[900].
The present oracle of Amorgos is of a higher order than this; its method is more complex, and its responses are more detailed. It should surely have ranked high even among the oracles of old, of which, both in the reverence which it inspires and in the medium which it employs, it is a true descendant.
Having thus examined the means by which the gods deign to communicate with men, and having seen that both in form and in spirit the ancient means of communion have been preserved almost unchanged, we have now to consider the means by which men approach the gods and communicate to them their hopes and petitions.
The first and most obvious method, one common to all religions, is of course prayer; but the use of this channel just because it is so universal cannot be claimed as a proof of religious unity between ancient and modern Greece. It is rather in what we should deem the accompaniments of prayer that evidence of such unity must be sought. The ancient Greeks were not in general content with prayer only. It was not customary to approach the gods empty-handed. The poor man indeed, according to Lucian[901], appeased the god merely by kissing his right hand; but the farmer brought an ox from the plough, the shepherd a lamb, the goat-herd a goat, and others incense or a cake. ‘Thus it looks,’ he says, ‘as if the gods do nothing at all gratis, but offer their commodities for sale to men; one may buy of them health, for instance, at the cost of a calf, wealth for four oxen, a kingdom for a hecatomb, a safe return passage from Ilium to Pylos for nine bulls, and the crossing from Aulis to Ilium for a princess—a high price certainly, but then Hecuba was bidding Athene twelve cows and a dress to keep Ilium safe. One must suppose however that they have plenty of things to dispose of at the price of a cock, a garland, or even a stick of incense[902].’ That this is a fair account of the externals of Greek ritual can hardly be questioned; for Plato too, in more serious mood, says that ‘the mutual communion between gods and men’ is established by ‘sacrifices of all kinds and the various departments of divination[903].’ The ‘various departments of divination’ are clearly the means by which the gods communicate with men; and ‘sacrifices of all kinds’ therefore represented to Plato’s mind the means by which men communicate with their gods. Prayer, he seems to have felt, was a necessary incident in sacrifice, rather than sacrifice an unnecessary adjunct to prayer.
Now the word θυσία, which we commonly translate ‘sacrifice,’ was a term of very wide meaning in ancient Greek. In Homer the word θύειν was used of making any offering to the gods, and never denoted, though naturally it sometimes connoted, the slaughtering of animals—an act properly expressed by the verb σφάζειν. And in later times the substantive θυσία was still applied to almost any religious festival, at which undoubtedly some offerings, but not necessarily animal sacrifices, were always made. When therefore Plato speaks of θυσίαι πᾶσαι, ‘all sacrifices,’ he is clearly expressing his recognition of the fact that sacrifices (θυσίαι) are manifold in kind—and if in kind, therefore also in intention; for different rituals are the expressions of different religious motives. Communion with the gods was in general terms the object of all offerings made to them by men; but the particular aspect of such communion varied.
Offerings, we may suppose, were rarely if ever made purely for the benefit of the gods without any self-seeking on the part of the worshipper. Even when a sacrifice to some god was merely a pretext for social entertainments—and how frequently this was the case is shown by the fact that φιλοθύτης, ‘fond of sacrificing,’ came to mean simply ‘hospitable’—it is reasonable to suppose that the presentation to the god of the less edible portions of the victim was accompanied at least by an ἵλαθι, ‘be propitious,’ by way of grace before the meal; and at more strictly religious functions, at which the guests, if there were any, were secondary to the god, the dedication of the offering undoubtedly included a declaration of the offerer’s motive.
As regards the character of that motive in most cases, Lucian is right; it was frankly and baldly commercial. Homer does not blink the fact; for Phoenix even commends to the notice of Achilles the open mind displayed by the gods towards an open-handed suppliant. ‘Verily even the gods may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are greater than thine; yet even them do men, when they pray, turn from their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows, with fat and the savour of sacrifice, whensoever a man hath transgressed and done amiss[904].’ And so Greek feeling has ever remained. Offerings are the ordinary means of gaining access to the gods, of buying their goodwill and buying off their anger. The ordinary medium of exchange in such commerce was, when Greece was avowedly pagan, food, and is, now that Greece is nominally Christian, candles: for religion, ever conservative, keeps up the otherwise obsolete system of barter between men and gods, even though the priests of those gods are enlightened enough to accept of a secular modern currency. But the particular commodities in which the barter is made are of little consequence as compared with the spirit which has always animated such dealings. The substitution of candles for meat is practically the only modification which Christianity has effected in this department of religion.
Even this change in detail does not affect the whole range of such operations; candles are not by any means the only offerings of which the Church takes cognisance. In dealing with the question of divination, we have seen cases in which on some religious occasion, saint’s-day or wedding, the priest blesses a genuinely sacrificial victim[905]. We have seen too that at the laying of foundation stones, a religious ceremony conducted by a priest of the Church, some animal is immolated to appease the genius of the site[906]. We have seen again how the Church permits or encourages the dedication of those silver-foil models of various objects—ships and houses, corn-fields and vineyards, eyes and limbs—which serve at once to propitiate the saint to whom they are offered and, on the principle of sympathetic magic, to place the object, thus represented as it were by proxy, under the saint’s special care; and how also the same kind of models are frequently dedicated as thank-offerings[907]; so that indeed, in default of an inscription announcing the motive of the offerer, no one can decide how any given offerings of this kind should be classified[908].
Then too in those religious rites which have survived without ecclesiastical sanction the use and the purpose of food-offerings remain unchanged. The favour of the Fates is bought by offerings of cakes in order that they may bestow upon the women who thus propitiate them the blessing of children[909]. Nereids who have ‘seized’ children are known to withdraw their oft-times baneful influence when the mother takes a present of food to the scene of the calamity and cries to them with an Homeric simplicity, ‘Eat ye the little cakes, good queens, and heal my child[910].’ Even the malice of Callicantzari may sometimes be averted by a present of pork[911].
Thus with or without the ratification of the Church the old offerings still continue to be made in the self-same form; and even where other substitutes have been devised, the spirit which animates the dedication of them is unchanged—a spirit essentially commercial; it matters little whether the suppliant is trying to buy blessings or to get the punishment which he has deserved commuted for a fine, or again whether he is speculating in future favours or settling in accordance with a vow for favours received; in each case there is the quid pro quo, the bargaining that the Greek has never been able to forego, not even in his religion.
But while the spirit thus manifested is not wholly admirable and perhaps deserved the ridicule of Lucian, it is highly instructive. The sacrifices or offerings are the means by which the worshipper gets into touch with the worshipped, the vehicle for his thanks or petitions; the possibility of bargaining implies intercourse; commerce is a form, even though it be the lowest form, of communion.
But that there were other kinds of sacrifice which represented higher aspects of the communion between men and gods in ancient Greece is certain. The commonly accepted classification of ancient sacrifices recognises three main groups—the sacramental, the honorific, and the piacular. Of the sacramental class, in which—by a development, it appears, of totemism—some sacred animal, representing the anthropomorphic god who has superseded it in men’s worship, is consumed by the worshippers in order that by eating the flesh and drinking the blood they may partake of the god’s own life and self, no trace, so far as I know, can now be found in the popular religion. The honorific class comprises the majority of those offerings which might with less euphemism be called commercial; those however which are prompted by the desire to expiate sin, or rather to buy off the punishment which sin has merited, would, I suppose, fall under the head of piacular. But the line drawn between the honorific and the piacular seems to me far from clear, for reasons which will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter.
The view of sacrifice which I am about to propound, and which would modify chiefly our conception of so-called piacular sacrifice in antiquity, was suggested to me by a story which I had from the lips of an aged peasant of the village of Goniá (the ‘Corner’) in the island of Santorini[912]. In talking to me of the wonders of his native island he mentioned among other things a large hall with columns round it which had long since been buried—presumably by volcanic eruption. This hall was of magnificent proportions, ‘as fine,’ to use the old man’s own description, ‘as the piazza of Syra or even of Athens.’ It was situated between Kamári, an old rock-cut shelter in the shape of an exedra at the foot of the northern descent from the one mountain of the island (μέσο βουνί), and a chapel of St George in the strip of plain that forms the island’s east coast. So far my informant’s veracity is beyond dispute; for in an account of the island written by a resident Jesuit in the middle of the seventeenth century I afterwards discovered the following corroboration[913]. ‘At the foot of this mountain[914] are seen the ruins of a fine ancient town; the huge massive stones of which the walls were built are a marvel to behold; it must have taken some stout arms and portentous hands to handle them.... Among these ruins have been found some fine marble columns perfectly complete, and some rich tombs; and among others there are four which would bear comparison in point of beauty with those of our kings, if they were not damaged; several marble statues in Roman style lie overturned upon the ground. On the pedestal of the statue of Trajan there is still to be read at the present day a very fine Greek panegyric of that powerful Emperor, as also on that of the statue of Marcus Antoninus.’ Thus much as guarantee of the old man’s bona fides, which even excavation on the spot, however desirable from an archaeological standpoint, could not more clearly establish than the French writer’s corroborative testimony; now for the story associated by the aged narrator with this wonderful buried hall. At the time of the revolution, he said, a number of the Greek ships assembled off Kamári (where a fair anchorage exists), and he with some fellow-islanders all since dead was going to fight in the cause of Greek freedom. Naturally enough there was great excitement and trepidation in this remote and quiet island at the thought of adventure and war. ‘So we thought things over,’ he continued, ‘and decided to send a man to St Nicolas to ask him that our ships might prosper in the war[915].’ They accordingly seized a man and took him to this large hall. There they cut off his head and his hands, and carried him down the steps into the hall, whereupon God appeared with a bright torch in his hand, and the bearers of the body dropped it, and all present fled in terror.
There are few grounds on which to argue for or against the credibility of this story. Historically Thera along with some other islands is recorded to have maintained the position of a neutral by paying contributions to both sides; but that does not in any way militate against the supposition that a few young men from the island were patriotic enough to volunteer for service in some of the Greek ships which may have touched—perhaps to secure that contribution—at Santorini. The story itself was narrated to me, I am persuaded, in all good faith, and the old man really believed himself to have taken part in the events described. His age would certainly have permitted him to fight as a young man in the revolution; he himself estimated (in the year 1899) that he had lived more than a century, and other old men of the village who were well past their threescore years and ten reckoned him senior to themselves by a full generation; moreover his own reminiscences of the war argued a personal share in the fighting. But whether the savage episode which he described was really a prelude to that most savage war, or some traditional event of the island’s history post-dated and inserted in the most glorious epoch of modern Greek history, is a question which cannot be finally determined. Chronology to a peasant who does not know the year of his own birth is naturally a matter of some indifference, and excitability of imagination coupled with the habit, or rather the instinct, of self-glorification in the Greek character, would account for an unconscious and not intentionally dishonest transference of the stirring events of earlier days to a date at which their narrator could have personally participated in them; there is no one so easily deceived by a Greek as himself, and no one half so honestly. Yet on the whole I incline to believe the story.
Fortunately the chronological exactitude and detailed precision of the story do not much matter. Accurate or inaccurate in itself it contains a clear expression of the view held by the old peasant of the purpose of human sacrifice. ‘We thought things over and decided to send a man to St Nicolas to ask him that our ships might prosper in the war.’ This is our text, and its very terseness and directness of expression prove how familiar and native to the speaker’s mind was this aspect of sacrifice. The human victim was simply and solely a messenger. St Nicolas, to whom he was sent, has supplanted Poseidon, as has been remarked above[916], in the government of the sea and the patronage of sailors; but how he came to be associated with the hall which was deemed a right place for the sacrifice, unless perhaps he had succeeded to the possession of the site of some temple of Poseidon, I cannot say. It is of little avail to press for further elucidation of a peasant’s story. I would gladly have learnt more about the hall now wholly buried but then partially at least visible above ground, into which none the less a descent by steps is mentioned; I would gladly have learnt more about the appearance of God with a bright torch in his hand, and what was the significance to the peasant’s mind of the appearance of God himself[917] (ὁ θεός) instead of St Nicolas to whom the messenger was sent. These uncertainties and obscurities must remain. The only additional fact which I elicited was that the man taken and sent to St Nicolas was in Greek parlance a ‘Christian,’ that is to say neither a Turk nor a member of the Roman Church which has long held a footing in the island. There was therefore no admixture of either racial or religious hatred in the feelings which prompted, as it is alleged, this human sacrifice.
If then the story be accepted, the motive assigned must be accepted with it; but if the story be discredited, the motive assigned has still a value. For even if the old man had deliberately invented the tale and claimed complicity in so ghastly a deed, whence could he have obtained that conception of human sacrifice which furnished the motive of the action? It is inconceivable that he should have evolved the idea from personal meditations on the subject of sacrifice. It is equally inconceivable that he could have obtained it from any literary source; for he could not read, and the only book of which he could have had any knowledge would have been the Bible, to which this view of sacrifice is unknown. The only source from which he could have received the idea is native and oral tradition.
So distinct an expression of the idea is naturally rare, because human sacrifice is not an every-day topic of conversation among peasantry; but such a theory of sacrifice is perfectly harmonious with that chord of Greek religion of which several notes have already been struck. To obey dreams, to enquire of oracles, to observe birds, to hear omens in chance words, to read divine messages in the flesh of sacrificial victims, to make presents to the powers above for the purpose of securing blessings or averting wrath—these are the ways of a people from whose mind the primitive belief in close contact and converse with their gods has not been expelled by the invasion of education; whose religion has not paid the price of ennobling its conceptions and elevating its ideals by making the worshipper feel too acutely his debasement and his distance from the godhead; whose instinctive judgement divides the domain of faith from the domain of reason, and accepts poetical beauty rather than logical probability as the evidence of things unseen. True indeed it is that of all the practices by which this people’s belief in intercourse with their gods is attested none is so remarkable as acquiescence or complicity in murder prompted solely by the belief that the victim by passing the gates of death can carry a message in person to one in whose power the future lies. But all that is painful and gruesome in such a deed only accentuates the more the unflinching faith of a people who, not in blind devotion to custom nor in fear of a prophet’s command, but intelligently and of piety prepense, could sacrifice a compatriot and co-religionist to ensure the safe carriage of their most urgent prayers.
If tragedy consists in the conflict of deep emotions, and religion in obeying the divine rather than the human, few deeds have been more tragic, none more religious than this. In that scene at Aulis when the warrior-king gave up his child at the prophet’s bidding to stay the wrath of Artemis against his host, the tragedy was indeed intensified by the strength of the human tie between the sacrificer and the victim; but blind and awe-struck submission to a prophet’s decree is less grandly religious than clear-sighted recognition and courageous application of the belief that the dead pass immediately into the very presence of the gods. Here are the two given conditions: first, the urgency of the present or the peril of the future requires that a request for help be safely conveyed at all costs to that god or saint in whose province the control of the danger lies; secondly, the safest way of sending a message to that god or saint is by the mouth of a human messenger whose road is over the pass of death. There is only one solution of that problem. And if it is true that only some eighty years ago the problem was solved at so cruel a cost, then the faith of this people in their communion with those on whose knees the future lies is more intense, more vital, more courageous than that of more Western nations whose religion has long been subordinated or at least allied to morality, and whose acts of worship are all well-regulated and eminently decorous.
Human sacrifice is known to have been practised in ancient Greece and the custom probably continued well into the Christian era. What was the motive which prompted the continuance of so cruel a rite? Was it the same as that which the old peasant of Santorini assigned for the performance of a like act in his own experience—that conception of the victim as a messenger with which he can have been familiar only from native and oral tradition? Assuredly some strong religious motive must have compelled the ancients to a rite which in the absence of such motive would have been an indelible stigma upon their civilisation, refuting all their claims to emancipation of thought and freedom of intellect, and branding them the very bond-slaves of grossest superstition. Even though they lived on the marches of the East where human life is of small account, the horror of the rite is in too vivid a contrast with Hellenic enlightenment for us to see in it a mere callous retention of an unmeaning and savage custom; but that horror is at least mitigated if underlying the practice there was some deep religious motive, if a genuine faith in the possibility of direct intercourse with heaven exalted above the sacredness of human life the sacred privilege of sending a messenger to present the whole people’s petition before their god.
But while it is easy to perceive that such a motive is in harmony with that belief in the possibility of the communion of man with God which is so pronounced a feature in the religion of the ancient Greeks no less than in that of their descendants, it is a far harder task actually, to prove that this motive was the one acknowledged justification for human sacrifice. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the whole subject; the very fact of the existence of the rite is known chiefly from late writers, Plutarch[918], Porphyry[919], and Tzetzes[920]; and anything like a discussion of the motives which underlay it is nowhere to be found. This reticence however was prompted, we may suppose, simply and solely by the patent barbarity of the act; it in no way impugns the latent beauty of the motive. Rather the persistence in a rite which did violence to men’s humaner feelings and moral sense proves the strength of the appeal which the motive for it must have addressed to their religious convictions. There was no place for shame in the belief that death was the road by which alone a human messenger could gain immediate access to the gods; but if a messenger were required to go at regular intervals, the regular occurrence of deaths required murder. This, I think, was the cause of shame and reticence.
Now if this very simple analysis of the feelings which almost barred the discussion or even mention of human sacrifice by ancient authors is correct, we should expect to find that, where death occurred naturally and not by human intervention, the conception of the dying or the dead as messengers to the unseen world would find ready and unembarrassed expression. And especially is this to be expected among the Greeks with whom grief has never imposed a check upon garrulity, but rather the loudness of the lamentation has always been the test of the poignancy of the sorrow. It is therefore in funeral-dirges and such-like that we must look for the expression of this idea.
An organised ceremony of lamentation is at the present day an essential part of every Greek funeral, and many dirges sung on such occasions have been collected and published. In these the conception of the departed as a messenger, or even as a carrier of goods, abounds[921]. A Laconian dirge runs thus: ‘A prudent lady, a virtuous wife, willed and resolved to go down to Hades. “Whoso has words” (she cried) “let him say them, and messages, let him send them; whoso has a son there unarmed, let him send his arms; whoso has son there a scribe, let him send his papers; whoso has daughter undowered, let him send her dowry; whoso has a little child, let him send his swaddling clothes.”’[922]
The same thought inspires a dirge in Passow’s collection[923], in which the thoughts of a dead man, round whose body the women are sitting and weeping, are thus expressed: ‘Why stand ye round about me, all ye sorrowing women? Have I come forth from Hades, forth from the world below? Nay, now am I making ready, now am I at the point to go. Whoso hath word, let him speak it, and message, let him tell it; whoso hath long complaint, let him write and send it.’ And again in another funeral-song a dead man is described as a ‘trusty courier bound for the world below[924].’
This sentiment, so frequently and so clearly expressed in the modern dirges, is of ancient descent. Polyxena, about to be sacrificed at Achilles’ tomb, is made by Euripides to address to her mother the question, ‘What am I to say from thee to Hector or to thy aged husband?’, and Hecuba answers, ‘My message is that I am of all women most miserable[925].’ And it is the same genuinely Hellenic thought which Vergil attributes to Neoptolemus when he answers Priam’s taunts of degeneracy with the words, ‘These tidings then thou shalt carry, and shalt go as messenger to my sire, the son of Peleus; forget not to tell him of my sorry deeds and that Neoptolemus is no true son. Now die[926].’
And it is not only in the poetry of ancient and modern Greece but also in the actual customs of the people that this idea has found expression. At the present day funerals are constantly treated by the peasants as real opportunities of communicating with their dead friends and relatives. Whether the custom is ever carried out exactly as it once was by the Galatae, who used to write letters to the departed and to lay them on the pyre of each new courier to the lower world[927], I cannot definitely say; but a proverbial expression used of a person dangerously ill, μαζεύει γράμματα γιὰ τοὺς πεθαμμένους, ‘he is collecting letters for the dead,’ lends colour to the supposition that either now or in earlier days this form of the custom is or has been in vogue. But in general now certainly the messages are not written but verbal. It is a common custom, noticed by many writers on Greek folklore[928], for the women who assist in the ceremonial lamentation which precedes the interment to insert in the dirges, which they each in turn contribute, messages which they require the newly-dead to deliver to some departed person whom they name, or, according to a slightly different usage, to whisper such messages secretly in the ear of the dead either immediately before the body is borne away to the church[929], or, where women are allowed to attend the actual interment, at the moment of ‘the last kiss’ (ὁ τελευταῖος ἀσπασμός), which forms an essential and very painful part of the Eastern rite.
The antiquity of this custom appears to me to be as certain as anything which is not explicitly stated in ancient literature can be. For in every detail of ancient funeral usage known to us there is so complete a coincidence with modern usage that it would be absurd not to supplement records of the past by observation of the present. Actually to establish that identity in every particular is beyond the scope of the present chapter and must be reserved until later; but my assertion may be justified here by reference to three points in Solon’s legislation on the subject of funerals. That legislation was directed against three practices to which mourners were addicted in this ceremonial lamentation of which I have been speaking—laceration of the cheeks and breast, the use of set and premeditated dirges, and lamentation for any other than him whose funeral was in progress[930]—customs which all still flourish.
The laceration is quite a common feature of such occasions. Indeed in some districts the women nearest of kin to the deceased are almost thought to fail in their duty to him if they do not work themselves up into an hysterical mood and testify to the wildness of their grief by tearing out their hair and scratching their cheeks till the blood flows. Such a display of agony, it must be remembered, comes easy to the Greeks: for their temperament is such that, even when the fact of the bereavement has moved them little, the rôle of the bereaved excites them to the most dramatic excesses. Men rarely if ever now take part in this scene, and are certainly not guilty of such transports; for their usual method of mourning is to let their hair grow instead of tearing it out, and to avoid laceration by forswearing the razor.
Again, the use of set dirges, composed or adapted beforehand to suit the estate and circumstances of the deceased, is almost universal; and so essential to the funeral-rite is the formal lamentation that there are actually women whose profession it is to intone dirges and who are hired for the occasion. These professional mourners (μυρολογήτριαις or μυρολογίστριαις) take their seats round the corpse in order of seniority and assist the wife, mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts, who also take their seats according to degree of kinship (the head of the bier being of course the place of honour), to keep up an incessant flow of lamentation. The scene differs in no detail, save that the hired mourners now are always women, from that which was enacted round the body of Hector. There too ‘they set singers to lead the lamentation,’ and of the women present it was Andromache, the wife, who began the wailing, Hecuba, the mother, who followed next, and Helen whose voice was heard third and last[931]. The singers who led the lamentation were probably then as now hired, for Plato speaks of paid minstrels at funerals using a particular style of music known as Carian[932]—a custom suggestive of antiquity; and in all probability the singing of set dirges, which Solon tried to suppress, was the recognised business of professional and paid mourners; for dirges premeditated by the relatives would have been less objectionable, one may suppose, than their hysterical improvisations. What success his legislation obtained in Athens cannot now be ascertained; but the custom was undoubtedly universal in Greece, and with the exception of the Ionian islands, where the Venetians imitated Solon in sternly repressing what they regarded as a scandal and a grave offence against public decency[933], all parts of Greece still to some extent retain it; and it is likely long to survive for the simple reason that lamentation has always been held by the Greeks to be as essential to the repose of the dead as burial. There is more than hazard in the repeated collocation of ἄκλαυτος, ἄταφος, ‘unwept, unburied,’ in the tragedians[934]; there is the religious idea that the dead need a twofold rite, both mourning and interment.
The third point in the funeral customs to which Solon demurred was that mourners attending the ceremony of lamentation misused the occasion by wailing again for their own dead and neglecting him whose death had brought them together. This practice was known to the Homeric age; for while Briseïs ‘tore with her hands her breast and smooth neck and fair face’ and with shrill wailing and tears made lament over Patroclus, ‘the women joined their groans to hers, for Patroclus in form, but each really for their own losses[935].’ There is no intention of satire here; it is simply a naïve touch in the picture of a familiar and pathetic scene. Patroclus’ death furnished the excuse and the occasion for tears, but most of those tears—pent up till they might flow freely and without shame—were shed for nearer sorrows, dearer losses. To-day the manner is the same. In some districts, as in Chios[936], a woman’s desire to lament again over her own dead is recognised as so legitimate that etiquette merely prescribes that she first must make mention of the present dead and afterwards she is free to mourn for whom she will; and indeed throughout Greece the opportunity for rehearsing former sorrows is rarely neglected.
Now when in these details that have been enumerated (as well as in many others such as the washing, arraying, and crowning of the dead body, the antiquity of which will be treated in another chapter[937]) that portion of ancient usage which is known from literary sources is found surviving, point for point identical, as a portion of modern usage, then the defect of ancient literary sources is best and most reasonably supplemented from present observations. Thus we know from the Iliad that the women of the Homeric age used Patroclus’ funeral as an occasion for renewing their wailing over their own losses; we know too from Plutarch that in Solon’s age the same practice had attained such excessive proportions that legislation intervened to check it; the only detail which we are not told is whether the mourners in commemorating thus their own dead friends were wont to entrust messages for them to him about whose bier they were assembled. But when the ancient picture of funeral-usage corresponds thus in every distinguishable trait with the living scenes of to-day, clearly the right way of restoring that which is obscured or obliterated in the picture is to go and to see still enacted in all its traditional fulness that very scene which the remnants of ancient literature imperfectly pourtray. And by going and seeing we learn this—that one strongly marked characteristic of funeral-rites is the belief, both expressed in words and evidenced in acts, that he whose death has brought the mourners together is a messenger who can and will carry tidings to those who have preceded him to the world below. Then on looking back we may feel confident that that aspect of death, which prompted Polyxena to ask what message she should bear from Hecuba to Hector and to Priam, was no mere poetic conceit imagined by Euripides, but a common feature of the popular religion. The belief that the passing spirit is a sure and unerring messenger to another world has ever been the property of the Hellenic people.
Since then this belief existed in ancient times and the practice of human sacrifice also existed, it remains to enquire whether the two were correlated as cause and effect, as in my story from Santorini. In this enquiry the reticence of ancient literature on the subject precludes, as I have pointed out, actual certainty; but a passage from Herodotus offers a clue which is worth following up.
In speaking of the Getae, a Thracian people, he remarks that they believe in their own immortality. ‘They hold that they themselves do not die, but the departed go to dwell with a god named Zalmoxis.... And every four years they choose one of their own number by lot and despatch him as messenger to Zalmoxis, enjoining upon him the delivery of their various requests. The manner of sending him is this. Some of them are set to hold up three spears, while others take their emissary by his arms and by his legs and swinging him up into the air let him fall upon the spear-points. If he be pierced by them mortally, they consider that their god is favourable to them; but if death do not result, they lay the blame on the messenger himself and give him a bad name; but having censured him they despatch another man instead. Their injunctions are given to the messenger before he is killed[938].’
Now no one can fail to notice that Herodotus’ own interest in this custom centres not in the idea which prompted it but in the manner of carrying it out. His account of it reads as if he knew his Greek readers to be familiar enough with the conception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger to some god; but he seems to be contrasting the method adopted with some rite of which they were cognisant. Tacit comparisons of foreign customs with those of Greece occur all through Herodotus’ work. The points which he here seems to emphasize are, first, that the messenger of the Getae was one of themselves, not a prisoner of war or a slave; secondly, that impaling was the ritual mode of death—a mode which the Greeks held in abhorrence and would never have employed; and, thirdly, that the messages were committed to the victim’s charge before and not after death. The inference therefore is that Herodotus and the Greeks for whom he was writing were accustomed to some rite which was inspired by the same motive but was differently executed, the messenger being other than a citizen, the method of sacrifice less barbarous to their minds than impaling, and the messages being whispered, as at funerals, in the dead victim’s ear; for of course, if the newly-dead could carry tidings to men in the other world, they could equally well carry petitions to gods.
Moreover my contention that Herodotus had in mind some Greek rite, with which he was contrasting that of the Getae, is borne out by the passage immediately following, in which the idea of comparison comes to the surface. This Zalmoxis, he continues, according to the Greeks of the Hellespont and the Euxine, was in origin not a god but a man. He served for a time as a slave to Pythagoras in Samos, but having gained his liberty and considerable wealth returned to Thrace and tried to reclaim his countrymen from savagery and ignorance. The ways of life and the doctrines which he inculcated were such as he had derived from intercourse with Greeks and above all with Pythagoras, whose teachings concerning immortality and a future life in a happier land he both preached and (by the trick of hiding himself for three years in a subterranean chamber and then re-appearing to those who had believed him dead) illustrated in his own person. This story is neither accepted nor rejected by Herodotus, but, estimating Zalmoxis to have been of much earlier date than Pythagoras, he inclines slightly to the view that Zalmoxis was really a native god of the Getae.
If we may assume this view to be correct, what significance is to be attached to the story of Zalmoxis’ relations with Pythagoras? Evidently it is one of those fictions by which the ancient Greeks loved to bring the great figures of history into contact and personal acquaintance. Pythagoras and Zalmoxis were two names with which was associated the doctrine of immortality; some story therefore of their meeting was desirable. And since Pythagoras was Greek, Zalmoxis barbarian, the legend that the slave Zalmoxis was instructed by his master Pythagoras was more flattering to Hellenic pride than the idea that Pythagoras in his travels should have borrowed so important a doctrine from a foreign religion; and if chronology did not concur—well, imagination always had precedence of accuracy. To the Greeks who invented the tale fitness was of more account than fact; and for us who dismiss the actual story as mere fiction their sense of its fitness remains instructive. It shows that the Greeks recognised the existence of specially close relations between the religion of the Getae and their own—relations attested probably not only by their common acceptance of the doctrine of immortality, for that was the property of other peoples too, but also by some resemblance between the rites of the Getae which were based upon that doctrine and similar rites practised, as Herodotus hints, by themselves.
Then again if the motive which we have found operating in Herodotus’ time among the Getae and operating also less than a century ago among the peasants of Santorini was not the motive which prompted the ancient Greeks to human sacrifice, how can we account for the long perpetuation of the practice? It is practically certain that it was tolerated in Athens during the period of her ascendency and highest enlightenment[939]; but the repugnance which it inspired is proved by the reticence which almost concealed the fact from posterity. It was practised apparently in honour of Lycaean Zeus in the time of Pausanias[940]; but the horror of it closed his lips concerning this ‘secret sacrifice.’ Suppose then that the motive for this sacrifice had been the sating of a wolf-like god—for so Pausanias seems to have understood the epithet Λυκαῖος[941]—with human flesh; could such a rite have continued in any part of Greece for some six centuries after it had become repugnant at least in Athens? Was the supposed motive so sublime that it was held to hallow or even to mitigate the barbarity of the act? Or did the custom live on without motive when an anthropomorphic Zeus had superseded the old wolf-like deity? Custom, it is true, often outlives its parent belief; but custom itself is not invulnerable nor deathless if it has to battle against sentiments irreconcilably opposed to that original belief. If the purpose of propitiating a wolf-god with human flesh was rendered null and void by the modifications which the conception of Lycaean Zeus had undergone, how could the crude and savage rite have still flourished in the uncongenial soil of an humaner civilisation—unless of course some new stream of religious thought, instead of the original motive, had watered and revived it? The very fact that so hideous a custom was so long maintained in civilised Greece argues that, whatever the original motive of it may have been, only some strong religious belief in the necessity of it could have saved it from extinction in the historical age. Surely it was some convincing plea of justification, and not mere acquiescence in the inveteracy of custom, which caused Pausanias, though he could not bring himself to describe or to discuss the horrid sacrifice, yet to conclude his brief allusion to it with the words, ‘as it was in the beginning and is now, so let it be[942].’
My reasons then for suggesting that one motive which led to human sacrifice in ancient Greece was the belief that the victim could carry a petition in person to the gods are threefold. First, that motive was recognised as sufficient by a peasant of Santorini, who can only have inherited the idea, just as all the ideas of divination have been inherited, from the ancient world. Secondly, Herodotus appears to contrast the method of such sacrifice among the Getae with the method of some similar rite familiar to his audience and to imply that the motive in each case was the same. Thirdly, without an adequate motive—and it is hard to see what other motive could have been adequate in the case which I have taken—it is almost inconceivable that human sacrifice should have continued, in spite of the repugnance which it certainly excited, for so long a time. For these reasons I submit that the known belief of the ancients that the dead could serve as messengers to the other world and their known custom of making human sacrifice were correlated in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages as cause and effect.
The reservation, ‘in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages,’ is necessary; for I am at a loss how to determine whether the belief in question was the original motive of the custom or a later justification of the custom when its original motive had been forgotten. Either the belief was coeval with the custom, and both were inherited together from ancestors belonging to that ‘lower barbaric stage’ of culture in which ‘men do not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses[943]’; or on the other hand the custom of human sacrifice originated in some other motive (such as satisfying the appetite of a beast-like god) and remaining itself unchanged, while the conception of the god was gradually humanised until his beast-form and therewith the original purpose of the sacrifice were lost to memory, embarrassed a more enlightened and humaner age until a new justification for it was found in the messenger-functions of the dead.
In support of the former supposition it may be mentioned that tribes far more barbarous than the Getae (who may have benefited from Greek civilisation) have evolved the particular ghostly use of dead men’s souls which we are considering. In Dahome, according to Captain Burton, not only are a large number of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers slaughtered at the king’s funeral, that they may wait on him in another world, but ‘whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the (new) king, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours[944].’ There is therefore no objection to the supposition that the Hellenic people too from the days of prehistoric savagery were constantly actuated by this motive.
On the other hand it is equally admissible to think that some cruder motive first led the population of Greece to adopt the custom of human sacrifice, and that it was only comparatively late in their history, in an age when men’s humaner instincts were offended by the atrocity of the rite and religious speculation on the subject of the soul’s immortality was rife, that the old custom was invested with a new meaning. Herodotus clearly recognised the connexion between the rite of the Getae and the doctrine of immortality which was bound up with the names of Zalmoxis and Pythagoras; and it is possible that in Greece too the later justification of human sacrifice was founded on the same doctrine. It would have been an irony of fate truly if a doctrine not indeed founded, I think, but largely expounded by Pythagoras, who forbade his followers to kill even animals for the purposes of food, should have been so construed as to furnish a plea for the immolation of men; but it is quite clear that a belief in the activity of the soul after death, superimposed upon the desire for close communion between men and gods, might have had that issue.
But, as I have said, I see no means of deciding at what date the correlation of the conception of the dead as messengers and the custom of human sacrifice as cause and effect first entered men’s minds; but that in the historical age that correlation was acknowledged seems to me highly probable. Such a view would certainly have militated against the substitution of animal for human victims; for only a man would have been felt to be capable of understanding the message and of delivering it to the god to whom he was sent. This perhaps is the reason why the use of a surrogate animal—though early introduced, as one version of the story of Iphigenia proves—never met with universal acceptance, and why also at the present day there remains a vague but real feeling that for the proper laying of foundations a human victim is preferable to beast or bird[945].
To single out particular instances of ancient sacrifice in which this motive may have operated is, owing to the general absence of data concerning the ritual, well-nigh impossible. The sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus was performed upon an altar before which, according to Pausanias[946], there stood two columns and upon them two gilded eagles; and we may surmise that as the eagles represented to his mind the messengers sent by Zeus to men, so did the human victim represent the messenger of men to Zeus. But this can be only a conjecture, for Pausanias’ silence admits of no more.
Of the ceremony connected with the pharmakos, or human scape-goat, at Athens and elsewhere somewhat more is known. Certain persons ungainly in appearance and debased in character were maintained at the public expense, in order that, if any calamity such as a pestilence should befall the city, they might be sacrificed to purify the city from pollution. These persons were called φαρμακοί, ‘scape-goats,’ or καθάρματα, ‘purifications[947].’ ‘If calamity overtook a city through divine wrath, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other bane,’ a pharmakos was led out to an appointed place for sacrifice. Cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs were given to him. He was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and wild figs and other wild plants; and finally he was burnt with fire upon fuel collected from wild trees, and the ashes were scattered to the winds and the sea[948]. At Athens, it appears, this rite was performed, not under the stress of occasional calamity, but annually as part of the Thargelia, and was therefore associated with Apollo[949].
All this evidence, with corroboration from other sources than those to which I have referred, has recently been set forth by Miss Harrison, who certainly has made out a strong case for the view which she thus summarises: ‘The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion[950].’ In other words, the pharmakos was treated as an incarnation of the polluting influence from which the city was suffering; and his expulsion (which only incidentally involved his death) was the means of purification.
But there are certain points in the practice which incline me to put forward another view of the pharmakos. His mission undoubtedly was to purify the city; but the question to my mind is whether he was expelled as a personification of the pollution or was led out and despatched to the other world as a messenger on the city’s behalf to petition Apollo or some other deity for purification from the defilement.
It might, I think, have been this Greek rite which was present to Herodotus’ mind when he was describing human sacrifice among the Getae. He was apparently familiar, we saw, with the conception of the human victim as a messenger; and the contrasts in method which seem to have struck him most would certainly have been provided by the ceremony of the pharmakos. The Getae chose the victim by lot from among themselves; the Athenians apparently selected some deformed or criminal slave—one of the very scum of the population. The Getae impaled their messenger upon the spears of warriors; the Athenians treated the pharmakos as a burnt-sacrifice. The Getae entrusted their messages to the victim before he was slain; did the Athenians perchance whisper their petitions for purification in the ear of the dead pharmakos as he lay on the pyre? Was he the messenger whose treatment Herodotus had in mind?
There are certain points in the ritual itself which make for that view. The pharmakos was maintained for a time at the public cost. Why so? A kindred custom of Marseilles in ancient times supplies the answer. ‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down[951].’ The pharmakos was therefore publicly maintained in order that he might be purified by diet. Again, we know, the pharmakos was provided before the sacrifice with cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs—pure food, it would seem, with which to sustain himself on his journey to the other world. Again, he was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and branches of wild fig and other wild plants. Why with squill and wild fig? Because plants of this kind were purgative, as Miss Harrison[952] very clearly points out. Among other evidences of the existence of this idea, Lucian[953] makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was “purged and wiped clean and consecrated with squill and torches.” And why on the privy parts? Because sexual purity was required. When Creon was bidden to sacrifice a son for the salvation of his city in a time of calamity such as commonly called for the sacrifice of a pharmakos, Haemon was refused because of his marriage[954], and Menoeceus was the only pure victim. And why beaten at all? Because again, as Miss Harrison shows[955], the act of beating was expulsive of evil and pollution. So then the chief part of the ritual was devoted to purifying the pharmakos himself.
But if the pharmakos was thus himself made pure, how could his expulsion purify the city? How could a man deliberately cleansed by every religious or magical device serve as the embodiment of that pollution of which the city sought to be rid? Miss Harrison[956] seeks to explain this difficulty on the grounds of that combination of the notions ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed,’ ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ which the savage describes in the word ‘taboo.’ But the notion of ‘taboo,’ though complex, is not illogical; anything supernatural, which when properly used or respected is holy, is logically enough believed to be fraught with a curse for those who misuse or disregard it. But deliberately to purify that which is to be the embodiment of defilement is not the outcome of a complex but logical primitive notion; it is simply illogical.
The view of the rite then which I propose is briefly this. The pharmakos was originally a messenger, representative of a whole people, carrying to some god their petition for deliverance from any great calamity; and, that he might be fitted to enter the presence of the god, he was purified, like Menippus before he was allowed to approach even an oracle, by every known means. But the office of pharmakos did not always remain a post of honour. It was naturally not coveted by those who found any pleasure in life; and gradually the duty devolved upon the lowest of the low. Instead of an Iphigenia or a Menoeceus the people’s chosen representative was some criminal or slave, and the personality of the messenger overshadowed the character of his office. The original purport of the rite was forgotten. Instead of being honoured as the people’s ambassador, specially purified for his mission of intercession with the gods, he was deemed an outcast by whose removal the people could rid themselves of pollution. Thus the religious rite lost its true motive and degenerated into a magical ceremony of riddance.
That this debased idea was the vulgar interpretation of the rite in historical Athens is absolutely proved by a passage from Lysias’ speech against Andocides: ‘We needs must hold that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andocides we purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is[957].’ But the whole ritual forms a protest against that idea. Its keynote was the sanctification, not the degradation, of the pharmakos. In Marseilles indeed the people’s change of attitude towards the messenger whom they so scrupulously purified had gone so far that imprecations upon him were substituted for the prayers which he should have been bidden to carry; but in Athens and in Ionia the ritual itself, so far as we know, contained no suggestion of contempt or hatred of the victim. It was only the appearance and the character of those who were selected as pharmakoi which made of the word a term of vulgar abuse such as we find it to be in Aristophanes[958]; for the scattering of the victim’s ashes to the winds and waves must not be interpreted as an act denoting any abhorrence of the dead man. Its significance is rather this. Religious motives had involved an act of bloodshed, and the people who had performed it as a religious duty were, like Orestes, none the less guilty of blood. In any case of blood-guilt it was held prudent for the guilty party to take precautions against his victim’s vengeance; and one means to this end was, as we shall see later, to burn the body and scatter its ashes. In the modern story from Santorini there is a precaution mentioned which has precisely the same object; the victim’s hands, as well as his head, were cut off. This, as I shall show later, is a survival of the old μασχαλισμός or mutilation of murdered men, by which they were rendered innocuous, if they should return from the grave, and incapable of vengeance upon their murderers. There is then, I repeat, nothing in the ritual itself which suggests any contempt or hatred of the victim, as there assuredly would have been if from the first he had been the incarnation of the city’s defilement.
Possibly then the pharmakos was originally a messenger from men to gods, sent in any time of great calamity and peril; possibly too this significance of the rite had not in Herodotus’ time been wholly supplanted by the lower view to which Lysias gave utterance. Lysias was addressing a jury and abusing an opponent; a vulgar and base presentment of the pharmakos suited the occasion. But sober and reflective men may still have read in the ritual its early meaning and have recognised in the pharmakos, for all his sorry appearance, the purified representative of a people sent by them to lay their prayers before some god.
This, I am aware, is a suggestion and no more. To prove the existence of this motive underlying any given case of human sacrifice in ancient times is, owing to the meagre character of the data, impossible. But since at any rate the conception of the dead as messengers was known to the ancients—for that much, I think, I have proved—the suggestion deserves consideration. If it be right, it shows that even the most ugly and repulsive ceremonies of Greek worship need not be regarded as damning refutation of the beauty of Greek religion. Though the act of human sacrifice is horrible, the motive for it may have been sublime. Where else in the civilised world is the faith which whispers messages in a dead ear? Who shall cast the first stone at those who in this faith dared to speed their messenger upon the road of death? Surely such a deed is the crowning act of a faith which by dreams and oracles, by auspices and sacrificial omens, has ever sought after communion with the gods.
Yet no, that faith aspired even higher; another chapter will treat of a sacrament which foreshadowed not merely the colloquy of men with gods as of servants with masters, but a closer communion between them, the communion of love; for, as Plato says in the text which heads this chapter, ‘all sacrifices and all the arts of divination, wherein consists the mutual communion of gods and men, are for nought else but the guarding and tending of Love.’